aracter.

This also is to be observed in historical criticism.
All men feel a necessity of being on some terms with
their conscience, at their own expense, or at another's.
If they cannot part with their faults, they will at least
call them by their right name when they meet with such
faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of
deeds of violence or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice
of man to man, of great and extensive suffering, or any
of those other misfortunes which the selfishness of men
has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate the
doers of such things, and the age which has permitted
them to be done, with the full emphasis of virtuous
indignation, while all the time they are themselves
doing things which will be described, with no less
justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous
posterity.

Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings
of the poor in the days of serfdom and villanage;
yet the records of the strikes of the last ten years, when
told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less fertile
in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under
the Tudors and Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and
the Irish plague of 1847, the last page of such horrors
which has yet been turned over, is the most horrible
of all We can conceive a description of England
during the year which has just closed over us, true in
all its details, containing no one statement which can
be challenged, no single exaggeration which can be
proved. And this description, if given without the
correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why
the Cities of the Plain were destroyed, and England
was allowed to survive. The frauds of trusted men,
high in power and high in supposed religion; the whole-sale
poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food
--nay, of almost everything exposed for sale--the cruel
usage of women--children murdered for the burial fees
--life and property insecure in open day in the open
streets--splendour such as the world never saw before
upon earth, with vice and squalor crouching under its
walls--let all this be written down by an enemy, or
let it be ascertained hereafter by the investigation of
a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally
have judged our forefathers, and few years will show
darker in the English annals than the year which has
so lately closed behind us. Yet we know, in the honesty
of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be. Our