degree as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his
preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic
boatmen and courtesans, would be as obnoxious as Eugene Sue's idealized
proletaires, in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and
refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and
want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once
into a millennial state of _altruism_, wherein every one is caring for
everyone else, and no one for himself.

If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our
sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct
us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests
of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged
in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors
may be settled by algebraic equations--the dream that the uncultured
classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally to their
moral sensibilities--the aristocractic dilettantism which attempts to
restore the "good old times" by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to
grow feudal fidelity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an
artificial system of culture--none of these diverging mistakes can
coexist with a real knowledge of the people, with a thorough study of
their habits, their ideas, their motives. The landholder, the clergyman,
the mill-owner, the mining-agent, have each an opportunity for making
precious observations on different sections of the working-classes, but
unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at all, or its
results are too scattered to be available as a source of information and
stimulus to the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral
and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a
foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote
himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially
of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry--the degree in which
they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the
points of view from which they regard their religions teachers, and the
degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the
interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the
tendencies in their position toward disintegration or toward
development--and if, after all