now, in
these new circumstances, they will, to the worthy and unworthy, serve
out a double allowance of grog. In this way they hope to do it,--by
steering on the old wrong tack, and serving out more and more,
copiously what little _aqua vitae_ may be still on board! Philanthropy,
emancipation, and pity for human calamity is very beautiful; but the
deep oblivion of the Law of Right and Wrong; this "indiscriminate
mashing up of Right and Wrong into a patent treacle" of the
Philanthropic movement, is by no means beautiful; this, on the contrary,
is altogether ugly and alarming.

Truly if there be not something inarticulate among us, not yet uttered
but pressing towards utterance, which is much wiser than anything we
have lately articulated or brought into word or action, our outlooks are
rather lamentable. The great majority of the powerful and active-minded,
sunk in egoistic scepticisms, busied in chase of lucre, pleasure, and
mere vulgar objects, looking with indifference on the world's woes, and
passing carelessly by on the other side; and the select minority, of
whom better might have been expected, bending all their strength to cure
them by methods which can only make bad worse, and in the end
render cure hopeless. A blind loquacious pruriency of indiscriminate
Philanthropism substituting itself, with much self-laudation, for the
silent divinely awful sense of Right and Wrong;--testifying too clearly
that here is no longer a divine sense of Right and Wrong; that, in
the smoke of this universal, and alas inevitable and indispensable
revolutionary fire, and burning up of worn-out rags of which the world
is full, our life-atmosphere has (for the time) become one vile London
fog, and the eternal loadstars are gone out for us! Gone out;--yet very
visible if you can get above the fog; still there in their place,
and quite the same as they always were! To whoever does still know of
loadstars, the proceedings, which expand themselves daily, of
these sublime philanthropic associations, and "universal
sluggard-and-scoundrel protection-societies," are a perpetual
affliction. With their emancipations and abolition principles, and
reigns of brotherhood and new methods of love, they have done great
things in the White and in the Black World, during late years; and are
preparing for greater.

In the interest of human reform, if there is ever to be any reform, and
return to prosperity or to the possibility of prospering, it is urg