We know of nothing like it in the
entire range of historical literature. The veil is lifted up from the
England of a century and a half ago; its geographical, industrial,
social, and moral condition is revealed; and, as the panorama passes
before us of lonely heaths, fortified farm-houses, bands of robbers,
rude country squires doling out the odds and ends of their coarse fare
to clerical dependents,--rough roads, serviceable only for horseback
travelling,--towns with unlighted streets, reeking with filth and offal,
--and prisons, damp, loathsome, infected with disease, and swarming with
vermin,--we are filled with wonder at the contrast which it presents to
the England of our day. We no longer sigh for "the good old days." The
most confirmed grumbler is compelled to admit that, bad as things now
are, they were far worse a few generations back. Macaulay, in this
elaborate and carefully prepared chapter, has done a good service to
humanity in disabusing well-intentioned ignorance of the melancholy
notion that the world is growing worse, and in putting to silence the
cant of blind, unreasoning conservatism.
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