"The citizens like pounded pikes; The lesser feed the great; The rich for food seek stomachs, And the poor for stomachs meat."
This class of our fellow-citizens have an especial dislike of theorists, reformers, uneasy spirits, speculators upon the possibilities of the world's future, constitution builders, and believers in progress. They are satisfied; the world at least goes well enough with them; they sit as comfortable in it as Lafontaine's rat in the cheese; and why should those who would turn it upside down come hither also? Why not let well enough alone? Why tinker creeds, constitutions, and laws, and disturb the good old-fashioned order of things in church and state? The idea of making the world better and happier is to them an absurdity. He who entertains it is a dreamer and a visionary, destitute of common sense and practical wisdom. His project, whatever it may be, is at once pronounced to be impracticable folly, or, as they are pleased to term it, _Utopian._
The romance of Sir Thomas More, which has long afforded to the conservatives of church and state a term of contempt applicable to all reformatory schemes and innovations, is one of a series of fabulous writings, in which the authors, living in evil times and unable to actualize their plans for the well-being of society, have resorted to fiction as a safe means of conveying forbidden truths to the popular mind. Plato's "Timaeus," the first of the series, was written after the death of Socrates and the enslavement of the author's country. In this are described the institutions of the Island of Atlantis,--the writer's ideal of a perfect commonwealth. Xenophon, in his "Cyropaedia," has also depicted an imaginary political society by overlaying with fiction historical traditions. At a later period we have the "New Atlantis" of Lord Bacon, and that dream of the "City of the Sun" with which Campanella solaced himself in his long imprisonment.
The "Utopia" of More is perhaps the best of its class. It is the work of a profound thinker, the suggestive speculations and theories of one who could
"Forerun his age and race, and let His feet millenniums hence be set In midst of knowledge dreamed not yet."
Much of what he wrote as fiction is now fact, a part of the frame-work of European governments, and the political truths of his imaginary state are now practically recognized in our own democratic system. As might be expected, in view of the times in which the author wrote, and the exceedingly limited amount of materials which he found ready to his hands for the construction of his social and political edifice, there is a want of proportion and symmetry in the structure. Many of his theories are no doubt impracticable and unsound. But, as a whole, the work is an admirable one, striding in advance of the author's age, and prefiguring a government of religious toleration and political freedom. The following extract from it was doubtless regarded in his day as something worse than folly or the dream of a visionary enthusiast:--
"He judged it wrong to lay down anything rashly, and seemed to doubt whether these different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire men in a different manner, and be pleased with the variety. He therefore thought it to be indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another, to make him believe what did not strike him as true."
Passing by the "Telemachus" of Fenelon, we come to the political romance of Harrington, written in the time of Cromwell. "Oceana" is the name by which the author represents England; and the republican plan of government which he describes with much minuteness is such as he would have recommended for adoption in case a free commonwealth had been established. It deals somewhat severely with Cromwell's usurpation; yet the author did not hesitate to dedicate it to that remarkable man, who, after carefully reading it, gave it back to his daughter, Lady Claypole, with the remark, full of characteristic bluntness, that "the gentleman need not think to cheat him of his power and authority; for what he had won with the sword he would never suffer himself to be scribbled out of."
Notwithstanding the liberality and freedom of his speculations upon government and religion in his Utopia, it must be confessed that Sir Thomas More, in after life, fell into the very practices of intolerance and bigotry which he condemned. When in the possession of the great seal under that scandal of kingship, Henry VIII., he gave his countenance to the persecution of heretics. Bishop Burnet says of him, that he caused a gentleman of the Temple to be whipped and put to the rack in his presence, in order to compel him to discover those who favored heretical opinions. In his Utopia he assailed the profession of the law with merciless satire; yet the satirist himself finally sat upon the chancellor's woolsack; and, as has been well remarked by Horace Smith, "if, from this elevated seat, he ever cast his eyes back upon his past life, he must have smiled at the fond conceit which could imagine a permanent Utopia, when he himself, certainly more learned, honest, and conscientious than the mass of men has ever been, could in the course of one short life fall into such glaring and frightful rebellion against his own doctrines."
Harrington, on the other hand, as became the friend of Milton and Marvel, held fast, through good and evil report, his republican faith. He published his work after the Restoration, and defended it boldly and ably from the numerous attacks made upon it. Regarded as too dangerous an enthusiast to be left at liberty, he was imprisoned at the instance of Lord Chancellor Hyde, first in the Tower, and afterwards on the Island of St. Nicholas, where disease and imprudent remedies brought on a partial derangement, from which he never recovered.
Bernardin St. Pierre, whose pathetic tale of "Paul and Virginia" has found admirers in every language of the civilized world, in a fragment, entitled "Arcadia," attempted to depict an ideal republic, without priest, noble, or slave, where all are so religious that each man is the pontiff of his family, where each man is prepared to defend his country, and where all are in such a state of equality that there are no such persons as servants. The plan of it was suggested by his friend Rousseau during their pleasant walking excursions about the environs of Paris, in which the two enthusiastic philosophers, baffled by the evil passions and intractable materials of human nature as manifested in existing society, comforted themselves by appealing from the actual to the possible, from the real to the imaginary. Under the chestnut-trees of the Bois de Boulogne, through long summer days, the two friends, sick of the noisy world about them, yet yearning to become its benefactors,--gladly escaping from it, yet busy with schemes for its regeneration and happiness,--at once misanthropes and philanthropists,--amused and solaced themselves by imagining a perfect and simple state of society, in which the lessons of emulation and selfish ambition were never to be taught; where, on the contrary, the young were to obey their parents, and to prefer father, mother, brother, sister, wife, and friend to themselves.
They drew beautiful pictures of a country blessed with peace, indus try, and love, covered with no disgusting monuments of violence and pride and luxury, without columns, triumphal arches, hospitals, prisons, or gibbets; but presenting to view bridges over torrents, wells on the arid plain, groves of fruit-trees, and houses of shelter for the traveller in desert places, attesting everywhere the sentiment of humanity. Religion was to speak to all hearts in the eternal language of Nature. Death was no longer to be feared; perspectives of holy consolation were to open through the cypress shadows of the tomb; to live or to die was to be equally an object of desire.
The plan of the "Arcadia" of St. Pierre is simply this: A learned young Egyptian, educated at Thebes by the priests of Osiris, desirous of benefiting humanity, undertakes a voyage to Gaul for the purpose of carrying thither the arts and religion of Egypt. He is shipwrecked on his return in the Gulf of Messina, and lands upon the coast, where he is entertained by an Arcadian, to whom he relates his adventures, and from whom he receives in turn an account of the simple happiness and peace of Arcadia, the virtues and felicity of whose inhabitants are beautifully exemplified in the lives and conversation of the shepherd and his daughter. This pleasant little prose poem closes somewhat abruptly.
Although inferior in artistic skill to "Paul and Virginia" or the "Indian Cottage", there is not a little to admire in the simple beauty of its pastoral descriptions. The closing paragraph reminds one of Bunyan's upper chamber, where the weary pilgrim's windows opened to the sunrising and the singing of birds:--
"Tyrteus conducted his guests to an adjoining chamber. It had a window shut by a curtain of rushes, through the crevices of which the islands of the Alpheus might be seen in the light of the moon. There were in this chamber two excellent beds, with coverlets of warm and light wool.
"Now, as soon as Amasis was left alone with Cephas, he spoke with joy of the delight and tranquillity of the valley, of the goodness of the shepherd, and the grace of his young daughter, to whom he had seen none worthy to be compared, and of the pleasure which he promised himself the next day, at the festival on Mount Lyceum, of beholding a whole people as happy as this sequestered family. Converse so delightful might have charmed away the night without the aid of sleep, had they not been invited to repose by the mild light of the moon shining through the window, the murmuring wind in the leaves of the poplars, and the distant noise of the Achelous, which falls roaring from the summit of Mount Lyceum."
The young patrician wits of Athens doubtless laughed over Plato's ideal republic. Campanella's "City of the Sun" was looked upon, no doubt, as the distempered vision of a crazy state prisoner. Bacon's college, in his "New Atlantis," moved the risibles of fat-witted Oxford. More's "Utopia," as we know, gave to our language a new word, expressive of the vagaries and dreams of fanatics and lunatics. The merciless wits, clerical and profane, of the court of Charles II. regarded Harrington's romance as a perfect godsend to their vocation of ridicule. The gay dames and carpet knights of Versailles made themselves merry with the prose pastoral of St. Pierre; and the poor old enthusiast went down to his grave without finding an auditory for his lectures upon natural society.
The world had its laugh over these romances. When unable to refute their theories, it could sneer at the authors, and answer them to the satisfaction of the generation in which they lived, at least by a general charge of lunacy. Some of their notions were no doubt as absurd as those of the astronomer in "Rasselas", who tells Imlac that he has for five years possessed the regulation of the weather, and has got the secret of making to the different nations an equal and impartial dividend of rain and sunshine. But truth, even when ushered into the world through the medium of a dull romance and in connection with a vast progeny of errors, however ridiculed and despised at first, never fails in the end of finding a lodging-place in the popular mind. The speculations of the political theorists whom we have noticed have not all proved to be of
"such stuff As dreams are made of, and their little life Rounded with sleep."
They have entered into and become parts of the social and political fabrics of Europe and America. The prophecies of imagination have been fulfilled; the dreams of romance have become familiar realities.
What is the moral suggested by this record? Is it not that we should look with charity and tolerance upon the schemes and speculations of the political and social theorists of our day; that, if unprepared to venture upon new experiments and radical changes, we should at least consider that what was folly to our ancestors is our wisdom, and that another generation may successfully put in practice the very theories which now seem to us absurd and impossible? Many of the evils of society have been measurably removed or ameliorated; yet now, as in the days of the Apostle, "the creation groaneth and travaileth in pain;" and although quackery and empiricism abound, is it not possible that a proper application of some of the remedies proposed might ameliorate the general suffering? Rejecting, as we must, whatever is inconsistent with or hostile to the doctrines of Christianity, on which alone rests our hope for humanity, it becomes us to look kindly upon all attempts to apply those doctrines to the details of human life, to the social, political, and industrial relations of the race. If it is not permitted us to believe all things, we can at least hope them. Despair is infidelity and death. Temporally and spiritually, the declaration of inspiration holds good, "We are saved by hope."
PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS. (1851.)
BERNARDIN ST. PIERRE, in his Wishes of a Solitary, asks for his country neither wealth, nor military glory, nor magnificent palaces and monuments, nor splendor of court nobility, nor clerical pomp. "Rather,"
he says, "O France, may no beggar tread thy plains, no sick or suffering man ask in vain for relief; in all thy hamlets may every young woman find a lover and every lover a true wife; may the young be trained arightly and guarded from evil; may the old close their days in the tranquil hope of those who love God and their fellow-men."
We are reminded of the amiable wish of the French essayist--a wish even yet very far from realization, we fear, in the empire of Napoleon III.-- by the perusal of two documents recently submitted to the legislature of the State of Massachusetts. They indicate, in our view, the real glory of a state, and foreshadow the coming of that time when Milton's definition of a true commonwealth shall be no longer a prophecy, but the description of an existing fact,--"a huge Christian personage, a mighty growth and stature of an honest man, moved by the purpose of a love of God and of mankind."
Some years ago, the Legislature of Massachusetts, at the suggestion of several benevolent gentlemen whose attention had been turned to the subject, appointed a commission to inquire into the condition of the idiots of the Commonwealth, to ascertain their numbers, and whether anything could be done in their behalf.
The commissioners were Dr. Samuel G. Howe, so well and honorably known for his long and arduous labors in behalf of the blind, Judge Byington, and Dr. Gilman Kimball. The burden of the labor fell upon the chairman, who entered upon it with the enthusiasm, perseverance, and practical adaptation of means to ends which have made him so efficient in his varied schemes of benevolence. On the 26th of the second month, 1848, a full report of the results of this labor was made to the Governor, accompanied by statistical tables and minute details. One hundred towns had been visited by the chairman or his reliable agent, in which five hundred and seventy-five persons in a state of idiocy were discovered.
These were examined carefully in respect to their physical as well as mental condition, no inquiry being omitted which was calculated to throw light upon the remote or immediate causes of this mournful imperfection in the creation of God. The proximate causes Dr. Howe mentions are to be found in the state of the bodily organization, deranged and disproportioned by some violation of natural law on the part of the parents or remoter ancestors of the sufferers. Out of 420 cases of idiocy, he had obtained information respecting the condition of the progenitors of 359; and in all but four of these eases he found that one or the other, or both, of their immediate progenitors had in some way departed widely from the condition of health; they were scrofulous, or predisposed to affections of the brain, and insanity, or had intermarried with blood-relations, or had been intemperate, or guilty of sensual excesses.
Of the 575 cases, 420 were those of idiocy from birth, and 155 of idiocy afterwards. Of the born idiots, 187 were under twenty-five years of age, and all but 13 seemed capable of improvement. Of those above twenty-five years of age, 73 appeared incapable of improvement in their mental condition, being helpless as children at seven years of age; 43 out of the 420 seemed as helpless as children at two years of age; 33 were in the condition of mere infants; and 220 were supported at the public charge in almshouses. A large proportion of them were found to be given over to filthy and loathsome habits, gluttony, and lust, and constantly sinking lower towards the condition of absolute brutishness.
Those in private houses were found, if possible, in a still more deplorable state. Their parents were generally poor, feeble in mind and body, and often of very intemperate habits. Many of them seemed scarcely able to take care of themselves, and totally unfit for the training of ordinary children. It was the blind leading the blind, imbecility teaching imbecility. Some instances of the experiments of parental ignorance upon idiotic offspring, which fell under the observation of Dr.
Howe, are related in his report Idiotic children were found with their heads covered over with cold poultices of oak-bark, which the foolish parents supposed would tan the brain and harden it as the tanner does his ox-hides, and so make it capable of retaining impressions and remembering lessons. In other cases, finding that the child could not be made to comprehend anything, the sagacious heads of the household, on the supposition that its brain was too hard, tortured it with hot poultices of bread and milk to soften it. Others plastered over their children's heads with tar. Some administered strong doses of mercury, to "solder up the openings" in the head and make it tight and strong. Others encouraged the savage gluttony of their children, stimulating their unnatural and bestial appetites, on the ground that "the poor creatures had nothing else to enjoy but their food, and they should have enough of that!"
In consequence of this report, the legislature, in the spring of 1848, made an annual appropriation of twenty-five hundred dollars, for three years, for the purpose of training and teaching ten idiot children, to be selected by the Governor and Council. The trustees of the Asylum for the Blind, under the charge of Dr. Howe, made arrangements for receiving these pupils. The school was opened in the autumn of 1848; and its first annual report, addressed to the Governor and printed by order of the Senate, is now before us.
Of the ten pupils, it appears that not one had the usual command of muscular motion,--the languid body obeyed not the service of the imbecile will. Some could walk and use their limbs and hands in simple motions; others could make only make slight use of their muscles; and two were without any power of locomotion.
One of these last, a boy six years of age, who had been stupefied on the day of his birth by the application of hot rum to his head, could scarcely see or notice objects, and was almost destitute of the sense of touch. He could neither stand nor sit upright, nor even creep, but would lie on the floor in whatever position he was placed. He could not feed himself nor chew solid food, and had no more sense of decency than an infant. His intellect was a blank; he had no knowledge, no desires, no affections. A more hopeless object for experiment could scarcely have been selected.
A year of patient endeavor has nevertheless wrought a wonderful change in the condition of this miserable being. Cold bathing, rubbing of the limbs, exercise of the muscles, exposure to the air, and other appliances have enabled him to stand upright, to sit at table and feed himself, and chew his food, and to walk about with slight assistance. His habits are no longer those of a brute; he observes decency; his eye is brighter; his cheeks glow with health; his countenance, is more expressive of thought.
He has learned many words and constructs simple sentences; his affections begin to develop; and there is every prospect that he will be so far renovated as to be able to provide for himself in manhood.
In the case of another boy, aged twelve years, the improvement has been equally remarkable. The gentleman who first called attention to him, in a recent note to Dr. Howe, published in the report, thus speaks of his present condition: "When I remember his former wild and almost frantic demeanor when approached by any one, and the apparent impossibility of communicating with him, and now see him standing in his class, playing with his fellows, and willingly and familiarly approaching me, examining what I gave him,--and when I see him already selecting articles named by his teacher, and even correctly pronouncing words printed on cards,-- improvement does not convey the idea presented to my mind; it is creation; it is making him anew."
All the pupils have more or less advanced. Their health and habits have improved; and there is no reason to doubt that the experiment, at the close of its three years, will be found to have been quite as successful as its most sanguine projectors could have anticipated. Dr. Howe has been ably seconded by an accomplished teacher, James B. Richards, who has devoted his whole time to the pupils. Of the nature and magnitude of their task, an idea may be formed only by considering the utter listlessness of idiocy, the incapability of the poor pupil to fix his attention upon anything, and his general want of susceptibility to impressions. All his senses are dulled and perverted. Touch, hearing, sight, smell, are all more or less defective. His gluttony is unaccompanied with the gratification of taste,--the most savory viands and the offal which he shares with the pigs equally satisfy him. His mental state is still worse than his physical. Thought is painful and irksome to him.
His teacher can only engage his attention by strenuous efforts, loud, earnest tones, gesticulations and signs, and a constant presentation of some visible object of bright color and striking form. The eye wanders, and the spark of consciousness and intelligence which has been fanned into momentary brightness darkens at the slightest relaxation of the teacher's exertions. The names of objects presented to him must sometimes be repeated hundreds of times before he can learn them. Yet the patience and enthusiasm of the teacher are rewarded by a progress, slow and unequal, but still marked and manifest. Step by step, often compelled to turn back and go over the inch of ground he had gained, the idiot is still creeping forward; and by almost imperceptible degrees his sick, cramped, and prisoned spirit casts off the burden of its body of death, breath as from the Almighty--is breathed into him, and he becomes a living soul.
After the senses of the idiot are trained to take note of their appropriate objects, the various perceptive faculties are next to be exercised. The greatest possible number of facts are to be gathered up through the medium of these faculties into the storehouse of memory, from whence eventually the higher faculties of mind may draw the material of general ideas. It has been found difficult, if not impossible, to teach the idiot to read by the letters first, as in the ordinary method; but while the varied powers of the three letters, h, a, t, could not be understood by him, he could be made to comprehend the complex sign of the word hat, made by uniting the three.
The moral nature of the idiot needs training and development as well as his physical and mental. All that can be said of him is, that he has the latent capacity for moral development and culture. Uninstructed and left to himself, he has no ideas of regulated appetites and propensities, of decency and delicacy of affection and social relations. The germs of these ideas, which constitute the glory and beauty of humanity, undoubtedly exist in him; but there can be no growth without patient and persevering culture. Where this is afforded, to use the language of the report, "the idiot may learn what love is, though he may not know the word which expresses it; he may feel kindly affections while unable to understand the simplest virtuous principle; and he may begin to live acceptably to God before he has learned the name by which men call him."
In the facts and statistics presented in the report, light is shed upon some of the dark pages of God's providence, and it is seen that the suffering and shame of idiocy are the result of sin, of a violation of the merciful laws of God and of the harmonies of His benign order. The penalties which are ordained for the violators of natural laws are inexorable and certain. For the transgressor of the laws of life there is, as in the case of Esau, "no place for repentance, though he seek it earnestly and with tears." The curse cleaves to him and his children.
In this view, how important becomes the subject of the hereditary transmission of moral and physical disease and debility! and how necessary it is that there should be a clearer understanding of, and a willing obedience, at any cost, to the eternal law which makes the parent the blessing or the curse of the child, giving strength and beauty, and the capacity to know and do the will of God, or bequeathing loathsomeness, deformity, and animal appetite, incapable of the restraints of the moral faculties! Even if the labors of Dr. Howe and his benevolent associates do not materially lessen the amount of present actual evil and suffering in this respect, they will not be put forth in vain if they have the effect of calling public attention to the great laws of our being, the violation of which has made this goodly earth a vast lazarhouse of pain and sorrow.
The late annual message of the Governor of Massachusetts invites our attention to a kindred institution of charity. The chief magistrate congratulates the legislature, in language creditable to his mind and heart, on the opening of the Reform School for Juvenile Criminals, established by an act of a previous legislature. The act provides that, when any boy under sixteen years of age shall be convicted of crime punishable by imprisonment other than such an offence as is punished by imprisonment for life, he may be, at the discretion of the court or justice, sent to the State Reform School, or sentenced to such imprisonment as the law now provides for his offence. The school is placed under the care of trustees, who may either refuse to receive a boy thus sent there, or, after he has been received, for reasons set forth in the act, may order him to be committed to prison under the previous penal law of the state. They are also authorized to apprentice the boys, at their discretion, to inhabitants of the Commonwealth. And whenever any boy shall be discharged, either as reformed or as having reached the age of twenty-one years, his discharge is a full release from his sentence.
It is made the duty of the trustees to cause the boys to be instructed in piety and morality, and in branches of useful knowledge, in some regular course of labor, mechanical, agricultural, or horticultural, and such other trades and arts as may be best adapted to secure the amendment, reformation, and future benefit of the boys. The class of offenders for whom this act provides are generally the offspring of parents depraved by crime or suffering from poverty and want,--the victims often of circumstances of evil which almost constitute a necessity,--issuing from homes polluted and miserable, from the sight and hearing of loathsome impurities and hideous discords, to avenge upon society the ignorance, and destitution, and neglect with which it is too often justly chargeable. In 1846 three hundred of these youthful violators of law were sentenced to jails and other places of punishment in Massachusetts, where they incurred the fearful liability of being still more thoroughly corrupted by contact with older criminals, familiar with atrocity, and rolling their loathsome vices "as a sweet morsel under the tongue." In view of this state of things the Reform School has been established, twenty-two thousand dollars having been contributed to the state for that purpose by an unknown benefactor of his race. The school is located in Westboro', on a fine farm of two hundred acres. The buildings are in the form of a square, with a court in the centre, three stories in front, with wings. They are constructed with a degree of architectural taste, and their site is happily chosen,--a gentle eminence, overlooking one of the loveliest of the small lakes which form a pleasing feature in New England scenery. From this place the atmosphere and associations of the prison are excluded. The discipline is strict, as a matter of course; but it is that of a well-regulated home or school-room,--order, neatness, and harmony within doors; and without, the beautiful 'sights and sounds and healthful influences of Nature. One would almost suppose that the poetical dream of Coleridge, in his tragedy of Remorse, had found its realization in the Westboro' School, and that, weary of the hopelessness and cruelty of the old penal system, our legislators had embodied in their statutes the idea of the poet:--
"With other ministrations thou, O Nature, Healest thy wandering and distempered child Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, Till he relent, and can no more endure To be a jarring and a dissonant thing Amidst this general dance and minstrelsy."
Thus it is that the Christian idea of reformation, rather than revenge, is slowly but surely incorporating itself in our statute books. We have only to look back but a single century to be able to appreciate the immense gain for humanity in the treatment of criminals which has been secured in that space of time. Then the use of torture was common throughout Europe. Inability to comprehend and believe certain religious dogmas was a crime to be expiated by death, or confiscation of estate, or lingering imprisonment. Petty offences against property furnished subjects for the hangman. The stocks and the whipping-post stood by the side of the meeting-house. Tongues were bored with redhot irons and ears shorn off. The jails were loathsome dungeons, swarming with vermin, unventilated, unwarmed. A century and a half ago the populace of Massachusetts were convulsed with grim merriment at the writhings of a miserable woman scourged at the cart-tail or strangling in the ducking- stool; crowds hastened to enjoy the spectacle of an old man enduring the unutterable torment of the 'peine forte et dare,'--pressed slowly to death under planks,--for refusing to plead to an indictment for witchcraft. What a change from all this to the opening of the State Reform School, to the humane regulations of prisons and penitentiaries, to keen-eyed benevolence watching over the administration of justice, which, in securing society from lawless aggression, is not suffered to overlook the true interest and reformation of the criminal, nor to forget that the magistrate, in the words of the Apostle, is to be indeed "the minister of God to man for good!"
LORD ASHLEY AND THE THIEVES.
"THEY that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick," was the significant answer of our Lord to the self-righteous Pharisees who took offence at his companions,--the poor, the degraded, the weak, and the sinful. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
The great lesson of duty inculcated by this answer of the Divine Teacher has been too long overlooked by individuals and communities professedly governed by His maxims. The phylacteries of our modern Pharisees are as broad as those of the old Jewish saints. The respectable Christian detests his vicious and ill-conditioned neighbors as heartily as the Israelite did the publicans and sinners of his day. He folds his robe of self-righteousness closely about him, and denounces as little better than sinful weakness all commiseration for the guilty; and all attempts to restore and reclaim the erring violators of human law otherwise than by pains and penalties as wicked collusion with crime, dangerous to the stability and safety of society, and offensive in the sight of God. And yet nothing is more certain than that, just in proportion as the example of our Lord has been followed in respect to the outcast and criminal, the effect has been to reform and elevate,--to snatch as brands from the burning souls not yet wholly given over to the service of evil. The wonderful influence for good exerted over the most degraded and reckless criminals of London by the excellent and self-denying Elizabeth Fry, the happy results of the establishment of houses of refuge, and reformation, and Magdalen asylums, all illustrate the wisdom of Him who went about doing good, in pointing out the morally diseased as the appropriate subjects of the benevolent labors of His disciples. No one is to be despaired of. We have no warrant to pass by any of our fellow-creatures as beyond the reach of God's grace and mercy; for, beneath the most repulsive and hateful outward manifestation, there is always a consciousness of the beauty of goodness and purity, and of the loathsomeness of sin,--one chamber of the heart as yet not wholly profaned, whence at times arises the prayer of a burdened and miserable spirit for deliverance. Deep down under the squalid exterior, unparticipative in the hideous merriment and recklessness of the criminal, there is another self,--a chained and suffering inner man,-- crying out, in the intervals of intoxication and brutal excesses, like Jonah from the bosom of hell. To this lingering consciousness the sympathy and kindness of benevolent and humane spirits seldom appeal in vain; for, whatever may be outward appearances, it remains true that the way of the transgressor is hard, and that sin and suffering are inseparable. Crime is seldom loved or persevered in for its own sake; but, when once the evil path is entered upon, a return is in reality extremely difficult to the unhappy wanderer, and often seems as well nigh impossible. The laws of social life rise up like insurmountable barriers between him and escape. As he turns towards the society whose rights he has outraged, its frown settles upon him; the penalties of the laws he has violated await him; and he falls back despairing, and suffers the fetters of the evil habit to whose power he has yielded himself to be fastened closer and heavier upon him. O for some good angel, in the form of a brother-man and touched with a feeling of his sins and infirmities, to reassure his better nature and to point out a way of escape from its body of death!
We have been led into these remarks by an account, given in the London Weekly Chronicle, of a most remarkable interview between the professional thieves of London and Lord Ashley,--a gentleman whose best patent of nobility is to be found in his generous and untiring devotion to the interests of his fellow-men. It appears that a philanthropic gentleman in London had been applied to by two young thieves, who had relinquished their evil practices and were obtaining a precarious but honest livelihood by picking up bones and rags in the streets, their loss of character closing against them all other employments. He had just been reading an address of Lord Ashley's in favor of colonial emigration, and he was led to ask one of the young men how he would like to emigrate.