1826. ] The Progress of Cant. 289 
melancholy mood, which they inherit from their German ancestors. 
Fanaticism has in all ages been more or less the vice of the English ; 
and where there are fanatics there must also be found hypocrites to 
profit by their zeal. This propensity to gloomy views of Divine Pro- 
vidence, and to an indulgence in speculative mysticism, is nurtured 
by the rivalty, not to say hostility, with which an infinity of sectarian 
religious look upon each other, and upon their common enemy, the 
establishment. To support the dignity of his party, the sectarian is 
obliged to assume pretensions to exalted morality; and, as it is not 
easy for humanity to maintain itself beyond its natural pitch of per- 
fection, this pretension must, in the long-run, end in seeming. The 
true fanatic cannot afford to be happy; and while he denounces the 
innocent amusements of life as crying sins, and interferes in all the 
domestic details of his neighbours’ privacy, he imposes upon himself 
a necessity for hypocrisy: and as that nature is not to be defrauded 
with impunity, the effort after superhuman perfection almost uni- 
formly leads to compensations for severity in secret indulgences. 
Popular governments also being favourable to domestic happiness, 
are likewise favourable to domestic virtues. On this account the 
people of England are apt to look down upon their continental neigh- 
bours, and to imagine, because they may be deficient in one particular, 
they are wanting in all morality. To write up to this fancied superiority 
of Englishmen is the business of every journalist: a circumstance 
which disseminates a profusion of cant concerning “ moral England,” 
which, like that of the ‘“ most thinking people,” is ever thrust forward 
the most boldly when there is something hollow or rotten to be con- 
cealed. After all, however, a very large portion of prevalent cant is of 
the manufacture of a few professional dealers in the craft; and the 
people of England pass it current “de bonne foi,” being in this particu- 
lar more sinned against than sinning. Bad even as we may still be, 
we may reply to the sneers of foreigners, in the language of Lubin and 
Annette, 
* Jwonseigneur, en notre place, 
Vous en aurez fait autant.” 
and we may with confidence add. that, politically speaking, the vice 
is on the decline. The opening of the Continent has dissipated much 
of that ignorance and self-conceit which thirty years of insulation had 
nurtured; and the experience of the last great revolution in Europe 
has cleared up a vast many errors by which the canters heretofore so 
largely profited. The unravelling of sophisms has, indeed, almost become 
a trade, and the disgrace of detection is beginning to follow very closely 
the hatching of each new imposition. As soon as the language of cant 
is translatable into plain English, its purpose, like that of the thieves’ 
slang, ceases to be answered, and it must drop of itself into neglect. It 
— therefore be safely anticipated that the habits of the next generation 
ill, in this respect, materially differ from our own, and that cant, like 
other moral evils, will disappear, when the progress of events has dissi- 
pated the combinations out of which it arose. e 
hod ; . ae } ; ’ : Tt 
M.M. New Series —Vou. Il. No. 9. 2P 
