One is that he is always the messenger of civilization; the other
that he is at least equally so--not only in what he brings, but in
what he ceases to bring. Thus the time was, and not so many years
ago either, when the newsman constantly brought home to our doors--
though I am afraid not to our hearts, which were custom-hardened--
the most terrific accounts of murders, of our fellow-creatures
being publicly put to death for what we now call trivial offences,
in the very heart of London, regularly every Monday morning. At
the same time the newsman regularly brought to us the infliction of
other punishments, which were demoralising to the innocent part of
the community, while they did not operate as punishments in
deterring offenders from the perpetration of crimes. In those same
days, also, the newsman brought to us daily accounts of a regularly
accepted and received system of loading the unfortunate insane with
chains, littering them down on straw, starving them on bread and
water, damaging their clothes, and making periodical exhibitions of
them at a small charge; and that on a Sunday one of our public
resorts was a kind of demoniacal zoological gardens. They brought
us accounts at the same time of some damage done to the machinery
which was destined to supply the operative classes with employment.
In the same time they brought us accounts of riots for bread, which
were constantly occurring, and undermining society and the state;
of the most terrible explosions of class against class, and of the
habitual employment of spies for the discovery--if not for the
origination--of plots, in which both sides found in those days some
relief. In the same time the same newsmen were apprising us of a
state of society all around us in which the grossest sensuality and
intemperance were the rule; and not as now, when the ignorant, the
wicked, and the wretched are the inexcusably vicious exceptions--a
state of society in which the professional bully was rampant, and