moral obtuseness,
exceedingly disgusting. There was a certain trial, or rather case
(for the grand jury could not find a bill), in which a woman had
murdered a child, got by her son out of a girl who lodged in her
cottage. The only evidence by which she could have been convicted
would have been that of the son himself, and he refused to speak.
The crime went unpunished; but I mention this to introduce what
grew out of it. One of the lawyers said that in the course of the
investigations which this case had occasioned it had been
discovered (though not in a way which admitted of any proofs
being adduced and any measures adopted upon it) that there was a
woman whose trade was to get rid of bastard children, either by
procuring abortions or destroying them when born, and that she
had a regular price for either operation.[2] I don't suppose that
the average state of morals is much worse in one county than in
another; but it is very remarkable that while education has been
more widely diffused than heretofore, and there is a strong
Puritanical spirit at work and vast talk about religious
observances, there should be such a brutish manifestation of the
moral condition of the lower classes, and that they should be
apparently so little humanised and reclaimed by either education
or religion. In this country all is contrast--contrast between
wealth the most enormous and poverty the most wretched, between
an excess of sanctity and an atrocity of crime.

[2] [The same thing was proved more than thirty years
later, on the trial of Charlotte Winsor, who eventually
escaped the fate she deserved on the ground of some
legal technicality which was taken up to the House of
Lords, and though it was decided against the prisoner,
the Government refused, after a considerable lapse of
time, to have her executed.]

George Villiers and Howard write equally bad accounts from their
respective Courts, neither seeing any hope of the termination of
the Peninsular contests, and each of them alike disgusted with
the men they have to deal with. Howard says that we could put an
end to the Portuguese affair whenever we chose, and that they
would submit to British power without thinking it a degradation;
that Miguel is not popular in Portugal, but that the priests have
made a crusade against Pedro and Liberal principles, and that
they drive the peasantry into the Miguelite ranks by the