tion between the peasant and the prince, differing from
that between the peasant and the savage? There are more enjoyments and
more privations in the one than in the other; but if, in the latter
case, the enjoyments, though fewer, be more keenly felt,--if the
privations, though apparently sharper, fall upon duller sensibilities
and hardier frames,--your gauge of proportion loses all its value. Nay,
in civilization there is for the multitude an evil that exists not
in the savage state. The poor man sees daily and hourly all the vast
disparities produced by civilized society; and reversing the divine
parable, it is Lazarus who from afar, and from the despondent pit,
looks upon Dives in the lap of Paradise: therefore, his privations,
his sufferings, are made more keen by comparison with the luxuries
of others. Not so in the desert and the forest. There but small
distinctions, and those softened by immemorial and hereditary
usage--that has in it the sanctity of religion--separate the savage
from his chief. The fact is, that in civilization we behold a splendid
aggregate,--literature and science, wealth and luxury, commerce and
glory; but we see not the million victims crushed beneath the wheels
of the machine,--the health sacrificed, the board breadless, the jails
filled, the hospitals reeking, the human life poisoned in every spring,
and poured forth like water! Neither do we remember all the steps,
marked by desolation, crime, and bloodshed, by which this barren summit
has been reached. Take the history of any civilized state,--England,
France, Spain before she rotted back into second childhood, the Italian
Republics, the Greek Commonwealths, the Empress of the Seven Hills--what
struggles, what persecutions, what crimes, what massacres! Where, in
the page of history, shall we look back and say, 'Here improvement has
diminished the sum of evil'? Extend, too, your scope beyond the State
itself: each State has won its acquisitions by the woes of others. Spain
springs above the Old World on the blood-stained ruins of the New; and
the groans and the gold of Mexico produce the splendours of the Fifth
Charles!

"Behold England, the wise, the liberal, the free England--through what
struggles she has passed; and is she yet contented? The sullen oligarchy
of the Normans; our own criminal invasions of Scotland and France; the
plundered people, the butchered kings; the persecutions of the Lollards;
the wars of Lancaster and York; the