t
of certain beatified Anarchies, sitting "quiet;" and of others in a
state of infernal explosion for sixty years back: this, the one view our
Europe offers at present, makes these days very sad.--

My unfortunate philanthropic friends, it is this long-continued oblivion
of the soul of law that has reduced the Criminal Question to such a pass
among us. Many other things have come, and are coming, for the same sad
reason, to a pass! Not the supreme scoundrel have our laws aimed at;
but, in an uncertain fitful manner, at the inferior or lowest scoundrel,
who robs shop-tills and puts the skin of mankind in danger. How can
Parliament get through the Criminal Question? Parliament, oblivious of
Heavenly Law, will find itself in hopeless _reductio ad absurdum_ in
regard to innumerable other questions,--in regard to all questions
whatsoever by and by. There will be no existence possible for Parliament
on these current terms. Parliament, in its law-makings, must really try
to attain some vision again of what Heaven's Laws are. A thing not
easy to do; a thing requiring sad sincerity of heart, reverence, pious
earnestness, valiant manful wisdom;--qualities not overabundant in
Parliament just now, nor out of it, I fear.

Adieu, my friends. My anger against you is gone; my sad reflections
on you, and on the depths to which you and I and all of us are sunk in
these strange times, are not to be uttered at present. You would have
saved the Sarawak Pirates, then? The Almighty Maker is wroth that the
Sarawak cut-throats, with their poisoned spears, are away? What must his
wrath be that the thirty thousand Needlewomen are still here, and the
question of "prevenient grace" not yet settled! O my friends, in sad
earnest, sad and deadly earnest, there much needs that God would mend
all this, and that we should help him to mend it!--And don't you think,
for one thing, "Farmer Hodge's horses" in the Sugar Islands are pretty
well "emancipated" now? My clear opinion farther is, we had better quit
the Scoundrel-province of Reform; better close that under hatches, in
some rapid summary manner, and go elsewhither with our Reform efforts. A
whole world, for want of Reform, is drowning and sinking; threatening to
swamp itself into a Stygian quagmire, uninhabitable by any noble-minded
man. Let us to the well-heads, I say; to the chief fountains of these
waters of bitterness; and there strike home and dig! To puddle in the
embouchures and drowned outsk