ength of
vice in ourselves that we cage, chain, torture, and hang men? Are none
of us indebted to friendly hands, careful advisers; to the generous,
trusting guidance, solace, of some gentler being, who has loved us,
despite the evil that is in _us_--for our little Good, and has nurtured
that Good with smiles and tears and prayers? O, we know not how like we
are to those whom we despise! We know not how many memories of kith and
kin the murderer carries to the gallows--how much honesty of heart the
felon drags with him to the hulks.

There is Good in All. Dodd, the forger, was a better man than most of
us: Eugene Aram, the homicide, would turn his foot from a worm. Do
not mistake us. Society demands, requires that these madmen should be
rendered harmless. There is no nature dead to all Good. Lady Macbeth
would have slain the old king, Had he not resembled her father as he
slept.

It is a frequent thought, but a careless and worthless one, because
never acted on, that the same energies, the same will to great vices,
had given force to great virtues. Do we provide the opportunity? Do we
_believe_ in Good? If we are ourselves deceived in any one, is not all,
thenceforth, deceit? if treated with contempt, is not the whole world
clouded with scorn? if visited with meanness, are not all selfish? And
if from one of our frailer fellow-creatures we receive the blow,
we cease to believe in women. Not the breast at which we have drank
life--not the sisterly hands that have guided ours--not the one voice
that has so often soothed us in our darker hours, will save the sex: All
are massed in one common sentence: all bad. There may be Delilahs: there
are many Ruths. We should not lightly give them up. Napoleon lost France
when he lost Josephine. The one light in Rembrandt's gloomy life was his
sister.

And all are to be approached at some point. The proudest bends to some
feeling--Coriolanus conquered Rome: but the husband conquered the
hero. The money-maker has influences beyond his gold--Reynolds made an
exhibition of his carriage, but he was generous to Northcote, and had
time to think of the poor Plympton schoolmistress. The cold are not all
ice. Elizabeth slew Essex--the queen triumphed; the woman _died._

There is Good in All. Let us show our faith in it. When the lazy whine
of the mendicant jars on your ears, think of his unaided, unschooled
childhood; think that his lean cheeks never knew the baby-roundness
of content tha