208 UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF PROPERTY. 



regarded with as little interest and less sympathy, than the motion of 

 the paddle-wheel of a steamer. Political economy is making us mere 

 calculators, and would close the safety valve of even such little 

 charity as may be remaining. The poor of this country now actually 

 look to the prisons as places of refuge, thank the magistrate that 

 commits them to " durance vile," and stand to be branded, no longer 

 sensible to the blush of shame. Is not this a fact to turn every bed 

 of down into one of torture? to convert the banquet room into a 

 place of reproach, where common sympathy would forbid the few to 

 feast while their fellow- creatures famish ? But from one end of the 

 nation to the other, the most gross inequality of property has 

 numbed common feeling ; the poor man forgets the privileges, and 

 the rich man the principles, of humanity. Factitious habits, by ren- 

 dering association partial and exclusive, annuls all sense of common 

 kindred, and in the estimation of the luxurious, the Lazarite is a 

 different order of being. But let the new-born of the palace and the 

 peasant's hut change places : will birth or breeding triumph in their 

 future character? Thus it is, that systems are stepdames to Nature's 

 children the capabilities God has given his creatures for happiness 

 is suffered to run waste like water, and toil is carried to torture to 

 perpetuate monopoly and misery. 



Horace Walpole says, <f If angels have any fun in them how they 

 must laugh at us !" It may as truly be said, if they have any pity in 

 them how they must weep for us ! The people of this unhappy planet 

 seem engaged in a sort of game atblindman's buff, and custom is the 

 band used to blindfold the eyes of their reason. The authority of 

 precedent is the warrant for practice, and, amid all the outcry for 

 reform, we seem to forget that, of which " The Gentleman in Black " 

 at the City Theatre nightly reminds us, that " all that is custom now 

 was innovation once." Reform can only properly pause when per- 

 fection is attained. The march of reform therefore is not likely to be 

 very limited, unless among those who, like the Chinese, make the 

 immature institutions of past ignorance and inexperience the rule of 

 future measures. (t Of all the fallacies with which man has attempted 

 to gloss his expedients, there are none more evidently false than that 

 which infers the duration of a social system from the length of time 

 it has already existed." Thus speak sthe greatA merican novelist 

 thus thinks every rational creature whether speaking it or not. 



The present time has one consolation the light of knowledge is 

 abroad. Some may say, " What good has it done ? There is not more 

 happiness now than in times past perhaps less." This may be true. 

 There is an intermediate state preceding any great change. Know- 

 ledge now enables the people to see abuses and absurdities ; it will 

 next enable them to mitigate, and at last, let us hope, to remove 

 them. The happiness of the past was something like the stolid 

 quiescence of Curran's client, who declared he never knew how ill he 

 had been used till he heard his counsel state his case in court. The 

 power of opinion is omnipotent, the increasing power and privilege in 

 exprexsing opinion will give the moving force to that mighty engine 

 which, under the guidance of knowledge, will enfranchise mankind. 



AN OLD WOMAN. 



