like all lies, it is cursed and damned from the
beginning.

"Even so, ye indigent millionnaires, and miserable bankrupt populations
rolling in gold,--whose note-of-hand will go to any length in
Threadneedle Street, and to whom in Heaven's Bank the stern answer is,
'No effects!' Bankrupt, I say; and Californias and Eldorados will not
save us. And every time we speak such lie, or do it or look it, as we
have been incessantly doing, and many of us with clear consciousness,
for about a hundred and fifty years now, Nature marks down the exact
penalty against us. 'Debtor to so much lying: forfeiture of existing
stock of worth to such extent;--approach to general damnation by so
much.' Till now, as we look round us over a convulsed anarchic Europe,
and at home over an anarchy not yet convulsed, but only heaving towards
convulsion, and to judge by the Mosaic sweating-establishments, cannibal
Connaughts and other symptoms, not far from convulsion now, we seem to
have pretty much _exhausted_ our accumulated stock of worth; and unless
money's 'worth' and bullion at the Bank will save us, to be rubbing very
close upon that ulterior bourn which I do not like to name again!

"On behalf of nearly twenty-seven millions of my fellow-countrymen, sunk
deep in Lethean sleep, with mere owl-dreams of Political Economy and
mice-catching, in this pacific thrice-infernal slush-element; and
also of certain select thousands, and hundreds and units, awakened or
beginning to awaken from it, and with horror in their hearts perceiving
where they are, I beg to protest, and in the name of God to say, with
poor human ink, desirous much that I had divine thunder to say it with,
Awake, arise,--before you sink to death eternal! Unnamable destruction,
and banishment to Houndsditch and Gehenna, lies in store for all Nations
that, in angry perversity or brutal torpor and owlish blindness, neglect
the eternal message of the gods, and vote for the Worse while the Better
is there. Like owls they say, 'Barabbas will do; any orthodox Hebrew
of the Hebrews, and peaceable believer in M'Croudy and the Faith of
Leave-alone will do: the Right Honorable Minimus is well enough; he
shall be our Maximus, under him it will be handy to catch mice, and
Owldom shall continue a flourishing empire.'"

One thing is undeniable, and must be continually repeated till it get
to be understood again: Of all constitutions, forms of government, and
political methods among men, the qu