request. Therefore let even the young be instructed betimes that in
this masquerade the apples are of wax, the flowers of silk, the fish
of pasteboard, and that all things--yes, all things--are toys and
trifles; and that of two men whom he may see earnestly engaged in
business, one is supplying spurious goods and the other paying for
them in false coin.

But there are more serious reflections to be made, and worse things to
be recorded. Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast. We know it,
if only in the business of taming and restraining him which we call
civilisation. Hence it is that we are terrified if now and then his
nature breaks out. Wherever and whenever the locks and chains of law
and order fall off and give place to anarchy, he shows himself for
what he is. But it is unnecessary to wait for anarchy in order to gain
enlightenment on this subject. A hundred records, old and new, produce
the conviction that in his unrelenting cruelty man is in no way
inferior to the tiger and the hyaena. A forcible example is supplied
by a publication of the year 1841 entitled _Slavery and the Internal
Slave Trade in the United States of North America: being replies to
questions transmitted by the British Anti-slavery Society to the
American Anti-slavery Society_.[1] This book constitutes one of the
heaviest indictments against the human race. No one can put it down
with a feeling of horror, and few without tears. For whatever the
reader may have ever heard, or imagined, or dreamt, of the unhappy
condition of slavery, or indeed of human cruelty in general, it will
seem small to him when he reads of the way in which those devils
in human form, those bigoted, church-going, strictly Sabbatarian
rascals--and in particular the Anglican priests among them--treated
their innocent black brothers, who by wrong and violence had got into
their diabolical clutches.