a convict for
life, or in the dashing Robson a maniac? If I tell you that respectable
old gentleman now coming out of his club is going to inspect a fresh
victim, whom some procuress has lured with devilish art, you will tell me
that I am uncharitable; or if I point you to that well-appointed equipage
in the Park, and tell you that that fair young girl that sits within has
crushed many a young wife's heart, and has sent many a man to the devil
before his time, you will tell me I exaggerate: I do nothing of the kind.
If I were to tell what most men know--what everyone knows, except those
whose business it is to know it, and to seek to reform it--I should be
charged with indelicacy, as if truth could be indelicate, and my book
perhaps suppressed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice--if that
abortion exists still. We are choked up with cant; almost everything we
believe in is a lie. The prayer of Ajax should be ours,--Light--more
light.

What are we to do?--to stand stock still, looking to heaven "with a
frenzied air, as if to ask if a God were there?" One can almost believe,
with George Gilfillan, that the earth needs a new gospel and a new
manifestation of divine power. From this low estate who is to rescue us?
Not the aristocracy, a barbarous institution, perpetrating barbarous
ideas in our midst,--that work is not honourable; whereas all true
civilization points us to the fact, that man is only happy and virtuous
as he is steadily industrious; and thus our most uncivilized classes are
our upper and lower,--our lords and ladies on one side, and our rogues
and prostitutes on the other. Not our law-makers, who imprison our young
lads in costly jails, where the criminals have luxuries denied to the
poor; and then in Newgate, or at the public works, mix them all up
together, that the comparatively innocent may learn to be adepts in
crime. Not our religious, I fear, when, from the Archbishop of
Canterbury down to Dr Cumming, the cry is, If you have a proper
translation of the Bible you will destroy the faith of the people. Not
our trading classes, becoming richer and more sunk in flunkeyism every
day. But it may be that these--

"Are graves from which a glorious phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day."

Whom am I to blame? Not the victims, but the fathers, and mothers, and
divines, and schoolmasters, and governing classes. Father, you have
given your bold, manly son an emasculated relig