part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely,
why should he have a better dwelling than the former?
But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found
that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward
circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him.
The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of
another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the
almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to
be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were
not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice
of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a
wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the
usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large
body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.
I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know
this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which
everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in
civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in
sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light,
without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of
both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of
shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their
limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at
that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this
generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent,
is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England,
which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to
Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on
the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of
the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other