At Least, There Is My Honorable Friend The Member For Stockport (Mr.
Cobden), Who Has A Lively Recollection Of That Classic Stream, For I
Remember One Of The Most Effective Allusions He Made To It In One Of
The Most Admirable Speeches I Ever Listened To.
But, notwithstanding
that allusion, I would still appeal to the poetry of his constitution,
and I know it abounds in that quality.
I am sure that he could not have
looked without emotion on that immortal scene. I still can remember
that olive-covered plain, that sunset crag, that citadel fane of
ineffable beauty! That was a brilliant civilization, developed by a
gifted race more than two thousand years ago, at a time when the
ancestors of the manufacturers of Manchester, who now clothe the world,
were themselves covered with skins, and tattooed like the red men of
the wilderness. But influences more powerful even than the awful lapse
of time separate and distinguish you from that race. They were the
children of the sun; you live in a distant, a rugged, and northern
clime. They bowed before different altars; they followed different
customs; they were modified by different manners. Votaries of the
Beautiful, they sought in Art the means of embodying their passionate
conceptions: you have devoted your energies to Utility; and by the
means of a power almost unknown to antiquity, by its miraculous
agencies, you have applied its creative force to every combination of
human circumstances that could produce your objects. Yet, amid the toil
and triumphs of your scientific industry, upon you there comes the
undefinable, the irresistible yearning for intellectual refinement - you
build an edifice consecrated to those beautiful emotions and to those
civilizing studies in which they excelled, and you impress upon its
front a name taken from -
"Where on AEgean shores a city rose,
Built nobly, dear the air, and light the soil,
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence."
Beautiful triumph of immortal genius! Sublime incentive to eternal
fame! Then, when the feeling is so universal, when it is one which
modern civilization is nurturing and developing, who does not feel that
it is not only the most benevolent, but the most politic thing you can
do to avail yourselves of its influence, and to direct in every way the
formation of that character upon which intellect must necessarily now
exercise an irresistible influence? We cannot shut our eyes any longer
to the immense revolution. Knowledge is no longer a lonely eremite,
affording a chance and captivating hospitality to some wandering
pilgrim; knowledge is now found in the market-place, a citizen, and a
leader of citizens. The spirit has touched the multitude; it has
impregnated the mass -
" - - Totamque infusa per artus,
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.
"I would yet say one word to those for whom this institution is not
entirely but principally formed. I would address myself to that youth
on whom the hopes of all societies repose and depend.
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