The National Register. — 1817-11-30 (London, England)

POLITICAL DISQUISITION.  THE CHANGE IN THE ENGLISH CHARACTER PRODUCED BY THE ABUSE OF THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.  IF the position, that extremes aproximate, wanted arty confirmation beyond what ages have given it, we might find that confirmation in the events of our own times ; in which excessive refinement is accompanied by excessicc crime. The instantaneous transition of a people, whose manners bud received an over-polish, from a s.e.te of easy and thoughtless quiescence, to one of turbalzace and unprecedented carnage, was fearftilly exemplified in the conduct of our neighbours. Happily for us, the asperities of our national character long preserved us from that close contact which hal !,roved fatal to the characteristic originality of continental nations. We appear, however, to be 1113 t approaching to tt at period when the moral virtues will only be known amongst us by recollection, and the worthiness of our fathers, like ancient nobility, will be invoked to hide .the unworthiness of our sons. It cannot be denied that society generally has received a polish in thi.; country, superior to what it had obtained at any former period ; that education is more general amongst ,the lower orders, and that efforts of unprecedented magnitude have been made to give them that religious instruction, the possession of which, alone, can render them happy in themselves, or valuable in Society. To what cause, then, are we to attribute the alarming increase of crimes ? crimes not of any particular character, but varied as the endless number of dispositions which give them birth. Petty thefts, frauds, burglaries, rapes, and murders of the blackest hue, fill up the calendars of our Lamest perpetual sessions; and to all this, unhappily, is to be added an unfeeling hardnessof heart ;—au insensibility to human suffering, in those persons whose province it is to watch over the poor and the helpless, as new as it is disgraceful to the English character, We have but to look at the events of the day, to convince us of the alarming ext nit of this evil. We one day find an unhappy creature suffered to die in a prison, under the inuneiliate eye of hs keeper, for lack of needful aid. On another, we find a whole ncidrbourhood, parish officers and all, shitting their ears to the cries of a numerous slimily perishing of famine and disease, and leaving them to sink one by one into the arms of death unaided and unpitied. This flintiness of heart and increase of crime are to be traced to the same sourse. To the profligacy of the daily press, which by teaching men to make a false estimate of their own importance in society has debauched their minds, and made them view with envy, those above them in rank, and those beneath them with scorn.— Added to this, a system of infidelity, (the constant attendant on false refinement), begun in this country by Price, Priestley and Paine, has been industriously ft& lewed up, and with the most .pernicious success, by Cobbett, the Exannuer I knit, and a swarm of wretches whose talents though in themselves despicable, yet when united and 'bearing all to the slime point. are calculated to produce, and indeed have produced, a deterioration in our eioral character which the virtue of ages will not be able to repair. These wrkers know, as their predecessors well knew, that to make men bad subjects, the most effectual way is to make them bad Christians; by teaching them to despise Divine laws lead them to violate those of human institution ; and both these bulwarks against (-rime being broken down, need we wonder if acts of the deepest enormity follow.  The man whose confidence in God is shaken, knows none of those feelings of tenderne,:s which soften the severity cf our destiny on carte ; insensible to those offwes of kindaess which 4mocth the brow of care awl dry