problem. False in the warp and false in the woof, thought one of
us; about as false a problem as any I have seen a good man set
upon lately! To guide scoundrels by "love;" that is a false woof,
I take it, a method that will not hold together; hardly for the
flower of men will love alone do; and for the sediment and
scoundrelism of men it has not even a chance to do. And then to
guide any class of men, scoundrel or other, _No-whither_, which
was this poor Captain's problem, in this Prison with oakum for
its one element of hope or outlook, how can that prosper by
"love" or by any conceivable method? That is a warp wholly
false. Out of which false warp, or originally false condition to
start from, combined and daily woven into by your false woof, or
methods of "love" and such like, there arises for our poor
Captain the falsest of problems, and for a man of his faculty the
unfairest of situations. His problem was, not to command good
men to do something, but bad men to do (with superficial
disguises) nothing.


On the whole, what a beautiful Establishment here fitted up for
the accommodation of the scoundrel-world, male and female! As I
said, no Duke in England is, for all rational purposes which a
human being can or ought to aim at, lodged, fed, tended, taken
care of, with such perfection. Of poor craftsmen that pay rates
and taxes from their day's wages, of the dim millions that toil
and moil continually under the sun, we know what is the lodging
and the tending. Of the Johnsons, Goldsmiths, lodged in their
squalid garrets; working often enough amid famine, darkness,
tumult, dust and desolation, what work _they_ have to do:--of
these as of "spiritual backwoodsmen," understood to be