text:  It is a providential blessing we firmly believe to a great nation to possess a class by fortune and station placed above the unseemly contentions of adventurers in public life: looked up to as men responsible without hire for the public weal and without sordid ambitions of their own solicitous to preserve it: looked up to moreover as examples of that refinement of feeling jealous sense of honour and manly independence serving as detersives of the grosser humours of commercial life and which filtering through the successive _strata_ of society clarify and purify in their course leaving the very dregs the cleaner for their passage