it, they are the wise men; the patient, self-denying, valiant;
the Nobles of the World; who can discern the Law of this
Universe, what it is, and piously _obey_ it; these, in late sad
times, having cast you loose, you are fallen captive to greedy
sons of profit-and-loss; to bad and ever to worse; and at length
to Beer and the Devil. Algiers, Brazil or Dahomey hold nothing
in them so authentically _slave_ as you are, my indigent
incompetent friends!

"Good Heavens, and I have to raise some eight or nine millions
annually, six for England itself, and to wreck the morals of my
working population beyond all money's worth, to keep the life
from going out of you: a small service to you, as I many times
bitterly repeat! Alas, yes; before high Heaven I must declare it
such. I think the old Spartans, who would have killed you
instead, had shown more 'humanity,' more of manhood, than I thus
do! More humanity, I say, more of manhood, and of sense for what
the dignity of man demands imperatively of you and of me and of
us all. We call it charity, beneficence, and other fine names,
this brutish Workhouse Scheme of ours; and it is but sluggish
heartlessness, and insincerity, and cowardly lowness of soul.
Not 'humanity' or manhood, I think; perhaps _ape_hood
rather,--paltry imitancy, from the teeth outward, of what our
heart never felt nor our understanding ever saw; dim indolent
adherence to extraneous and extinct traditions; traditions now
really about extinct; not living now to almost any of us, and
still haunting with their spectralities and gibbering _ghosts_
(in a truly baleful manner) almost all of us! Making this our
struggling 'Twelfth Hour of the Night' inexpressibly
hideous!-