back, the chair broken, and the bearers and surgeon hardly
escaping with their lives. Furious contests have taken place about
the burials, it having been recommended that bodies should be
burned directly after death, and the most violent prejudice
opposing itself to this recommendation; in short, there is no end
to the scenes of uproar, violence, and brutal ignorance that have
gone on, and this on the part of the lower orders, for whose
especial benefit all the precautions are taken, and for whose
relief large sums have been raised and all the resources of
charity called into activity in every part of the town. The awful
thing is the vast extent of misery and distress which prevails,
and the evidence of the rotten foundation on which the whole
fabric of this gorgeous society rests, for I call that rotten
which exhibits thousands upon thousands of human beings reduced to
the lowest stage of moral and physical degradation, with no more
of the necessaries of life than serve to keep body and soul
together, whole classes of artisans without the means of
subsistence. However complicated and remote the causes of this
state of things, the manifestations present themselves in a
frightful presence and reality, and those whose ingenuity, and
experience, and philosophical views may enable them accurately to
point out the causes and the gradual increase of this distress are
totally unable to suggest a remedy or to foresee an end to it. Can
such a state of things permanently go on? can any reform
ameliorate it? Is it possible for any country to be considered in
a healthy condition when there is no such thing as a _general_
diffusion of the comforts of life (varying of course with every
variety of circumstance which can affect the prosperity of
individuals or of classes), but when the extremes prevail of the
most unbounded luxury and enjoyment and the most dreadful
privation and suffering? To imagine a state of society in which
everybody should be well off, or even tolerably well off, would be
a mere vision, as long as there is a preponderance of vice and
folly in the world. There will always be effects commensurate with
their causes, but it has not always been, and it certainly need
not be, that the majority of the population should be in great
difficulty, struggling to keep themselves afloat, and, what is
worse, in uncertainty and in doubt whether they can earn
subsistence for themselves and their families. Such is the case at
pre