They never will love where
they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.
There is another piece of policy, not more laudable than this, in
reading these moral lectures, which lessens our hatred to criminals and
our pity to sufferers by insinuating that it has been owing to their
fault or folly that the latter have become the prey of the former. By
flattering us that we are not subject to the same vices and follies, it
induces a confidence that we shall not suffer the same evils by a
contact with the infamous gang of robbers who have thus robbed and
butchered our neighbors before our faces. We must not be flattered to
our ruin. Our vices are the same as theirs, neither more nor less. If
any faults we had, which wanted this French example to call us to a
"_softening_ of character, and a review of our social relations and
duties," there is yet no sign that we have commenced our reformation. We
seem, by the best accounts I have from the world, to go on just as
formerly, "some to undo, and some to be undone." There is no change at
all: and if we are not bettered by the sufferings of war, this peace,
which, for reasons to himself best known, the author fixes as the period
of our reformation, must have something very extraordinary in it;
because hitherto ease, opulence, and their concomitant pleasure have
never greatly disposed mankind to that serious reflection and review
which the author supposes to be the result of the approaching peace with
vice and crime.
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