Excerpt from Essays From the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews: With Addresses and Other PiecesI will tell you, Gentlemen, in the first place, why I think this occasion so important. We are assembled here in performance of our part of a process which is going on at present more slowly than might be wished, but which is at length fairly entered upon, and must advance with more rapidity as example sanctions and persuasion urges it, and will, I trust, in a very few years, be in active progress in every town, village, and parish in the kingdom - a process on which it is no exaggeration to say, that the future destinies of this empire will very mainly depend - because on it depends, by a natural and indissoluble link, our capacity as a nation for a high degree Of civil liberty. The process I mean is the active endea vour, on the part of every one who can lend a hand to it, to improve the standard of moral and intellectual culture in the mass of the people.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.