thought of them as possible. Not a very noble class of citizens
these; not a very hopeful or salutary method of dealing with
social iniquities this of theirs, however it may answer in
respect to themselves and their personal affairs! But now there
is the select small minority, in whom some sentiment of public
spirit and human pity still survives, among whom, or not
anywhere, the Good Cause may expect to find soldiers and
servants: their method of proceeding, in these times, is also
very strange. They embark in the "philanthropic movement;" they
calculate that the miseries of the world can be cured by bringing
the philanthropic movement to bear on them. To universal public
misery, and universal neglect of the clearest public duties, let
private charity superadd itself: there will thus be some balance
restored, and maintained again; thus,--or by what conceivable
method? On these terms they, for their part, embark in the
sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water;
desperately bent on trying to the uttermost that mild method. It
seems not to have struck these good men that no world, or thing
here below, ever fell into misery, without having first fallen
into folly, into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it, by adopting
as a law of conduct what was not a law, but the reverse of one;
and that, till its folly, till its sin be cast out of it, there
is not the smallest hope of its misery going,--that not for all
the charity and rose-water in the world will its misery try to go
till then!

This is a sad error; all the sadder as it is the error chiefly of
the more humane and noble-minded of our generation; among whom,
as we said, or elsewhere not at all, the cause of real Reform
must expect its servants. At present, and for a long while past,