e: and it must be confessed
that the actual responsibility is spread so thinly over so great a
surface that it is hard to say it rests very blackly upon any one spot.
Oh that we could but know whom to hang, when we find some flagrant,
crying evil! Unluckily, hasty people are ready to be content, if they
can but hang anybody, without minding much whether that individual be
more to blame than many beside. Laws and kings have something to do
here: but management and foresight on the part of the poorer classes
have a great deal more to do. And no laws can make many persons managing
or provident. I do not hesitate to say, from what I have myself seen
of the poor, that the same short-sighted extravagance, the same
recklessness of consequences, which are frequently found in them, would
cause quite as much misery, if they prevailed in a like degree among
people with a thousand a year. But it seems as if only the tolerably
well-to-do have the heart to be provident and self-denying. A man with a
few hundreds annually does not marry, unless he thinks he can afford it:
but the workman with fifteen shillings a week is profoundly indifferent
to any such calculation. I firmly believe that the sternest of all
self-denial is that practised by those who, when we divide mankind into
rich and poor, must be classed (I suppose) with the rich. But I turn
away from a miserable subject, through which I cannot see my way
clearly, and on which I cannot think but with unutterable pain. It is an
easy way of cutting the knot, to declare that the rich are the cause of
all the sufferings of the poor; but when we look at the case in all its
bearings, we shall see that that is rank nonsense. And on the other
hand, it is unquestionable that the rich are bound to do something. But
what? I should feel deeply indebted to any one who would write out, in
a few short and intelligible sentences, the practical results that are
aimed at in the "Song of the Shirt." The misery and evil are manifest:
but tell us whom to hang; tell us what to do!

One heavy burden with which many men are weighted for the race of life
is depression of spirits. I wonder whether this used to be as common in
former days as it is now. There was, indeed, the man in Homer who walked
by the seashore in a very gloomy mood; but his case seems to have been
thought remarkable. What is it in our modern mode of life and our
infinity of cares, what little thing is it about the matter of the brain
o