These cases, though here spoken of rhetorically, are of daily
occurrence; and, though they may seem few by comparison with the
infinite millions of the species, they are many indeed, if they be
reckoned absolutely for themselves; and throughout the limits of a
whole nation, not a day passes over us but many families are robbed of
their heads, or even swallowed up in ruin themselves, or their course
turned out of the sunny beams into a dark wilderness. Shipwrecks and
nightly conflagrations are sometimes, and especially among some
nations, wholesale calamities; battles yet more so; earthquakes, the
famine, the pestilence, though rarer, are visitations yet wider in
their desolation. Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, are
more frequent scourges. And most of all, or with most darkness in its
train, comes the sickness of the brain--lunacy--which, visiting nearly
one thousand in every million, must, in every populous nation, make
many ruins in each particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great
author, 'is not so sad a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.'
But there is a sadder even than _that_,--the sight of a family-ruin
wrought by crime is even more appalling. Forgery, breaches of trust,
embezzlement, of private or public funds--(a crime sadly on the
increase since the example of Fauntleroy, and the suggestion of its
great feasibility first made by him)--these enormities, followed too
often, and countersigned for their final result to the future happiness
of families, by the appalling catastrophe of suicide, must naturally,
in every wealthy nation, or wherever property and the modes of property
are much developed, constitute the vast majority of all that come under
the review of public justice. Any of these is sufficient to make
shipwreck of all peace and comfort for a family; and often, indeed, it
happens that the desolation is accomplished within the course of one
revolving sun; often the whole dire catastrophe, together with its
total consequences, is both accomplished and made known to those whom