irtue; but no one pretends to vice
who is not vicious. The bad things which can be proved of a man we know
to be genuine. He was a spendthrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he
equivocated. These are blots positive, unless untrue, and when they
stand alone, tinge the whole character.

This also is to be observed in historical criticism. All men feel a
necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own
expense or at another's. If they cannot part with their faults, they
will at least call them by their right name when they meet with such
faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of deeds of violence
or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice of man to man, of great and
extensive suffering, or any of those other misfortunes which the
selfishness of men has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate
the doers of such things, and the age which has permitted them to be
done, with the full emphasis of virtuous indignation, while all the time
they are themselves doing things which will be described, with no less
justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous posterity.

Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings of the poor in
the days of serfdom and villanage; yet the records of the strikes of the
last ten years, when told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less
fertile in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under the Tudors and
Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and the Irish plague of 1847, the last
page of such horrors which has yet been turned over, is the most
horrible of all. We can conceive a description of England during the
year which has just closed over us (1856), true in all its details,
containing no one statement which can be challenged, no single
exaggeration which can be proved; and this description, if given without
the correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why the Cities of
the Plain were destroyed, and England was allowed to survive. The frauds
of trusted men, high in power and high in supposed religion; the
wholesale poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food--nay, of
almost everything exposed for sale--the cruel usage of women--children
murdered for the burial fees--life and property insecure in open day in
the open streets--splendour such as the world never saw before upon
earth, with vice and squalor crouching under its walls--let all this be
written down by an enemy, or let it be ascertained hereafter by the
investigation o