victim is compelled to stand behind
the counter, and is threatened with beggary if he fail practically to
remember that the pursuit of money, to the utter exclusion of aught
higher and nobler, is the end for which life is given man. No wonder
such a system fearfully avenges itself--that the sensual is exalted--that
we meet so little in accordance with principle and truth. Debarred from
intellectual pursuits, what awaits our young men but frivolous
excitement? Ignorant, with the feelings of our common nature unnaturally
aroused--with minds enfeebled by lack of healthy exercise--our middle
class--the class perhaps the most important in our land--stands by
society in its conventionalism and falsehood and wrong, and we mourn and
sigh over giant ills, that we cannot grapple with effectually because we
go the wrong way to work.

A great want of our age is education for the middle classes. We want to
have them taught to believe in something else than the shop or the desk.
We want them to believe the mind as fully entitled to their care as the
body, and the money-bag but poor and impotent compared with the
well-spent life. We would publish the all-important truth--a truth that
shall live and fructify when the great city in which we write shall have
become a desert-waste--the truth that man was made in the image of his
maker, and that the heart that beats within is capable of divinity
itself. We may have drawn in dark colours our national state. We fear
the picture is but too true; and that till something be done to burst the
bonds of habit, and educate the youth in our shops, the picture will
continue to be true. We write not to deprecate the land of our birth; it
is one dear to us by every remembrance of the past and hope for the
future. Because we thus cling to it do we deplore and expose what we
deem to be wrong, and that our social condition may be healthy, that our
civilization may be complete that our faith may be a living leavening
power, do we ask the emancipation of the sons and daughters of
trade--that that long-looked-for hour may quickly come.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE LONDON VOLUNTEERS.

In spite of Lord Palmerston's injudicious attempt to check the rifle
movement in its infancy, there can be no doubt now but that it is a
complete success. The appeal to the martial spirit--more or less strong
in the hearts of all Englishmen--has been most cheerfully responded to.
Something of the kind was evidently req