earing of the never-ending moan of misfortune in a city
in which police stations shelter 150,000 of the _utterly destitute_
every year, is a picturesque way of ignoring that brotherhood of
humanity, which is gently and inoffensively referred to on Sunday.

Moralists and pietists have been so utterly blind to the nature of
CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, that society is not shocked to read in parallel
columns the crushing agonies of famine and pestilence, and the costly
revels of aristocracy, or the millions wasted on royal families, that
manifest about as much concern for the suffering million as a farmer
feels for the squealing of his pigs in cold weather. No one is surprised
or shocked to hear that in India, a land famed for poverty, famine, and
pestilence, the maharajah of Baroda could offer a pearly and jewelled
carpet, ten feet by six, costing a million of dollars, as a present to
the woman who had pleased his fancy.[11] How many lives and how much of
agony did that carpet represent in a country where five cents pays for a
day's labor? Twenty million days' labor is a small matter to a petty
prince.

[11] This love of ostentation has much to do with the
degradation of India. The silver money which should be in
circulation is hoarded up or used for silver ornaments. A
wedding in that country is not marked by proper preparation
for the duties and expenses of conjugal life, but by a
display of jewelry and silver. A thousand rupees' worth
must be furnished by the bride, and two thousand by the
bridegroom, if they are able to raise so much, and
sometimes they raise it by going in debt beyond their
ability to pay. This love of ostentation marks an inferior
type of human development.

CRIMINAL OSTENTATION stands ever in the way of man's progress to a
higher condition, like a wasting disease that comes in to arrest the
recovery of a patient. All schemes of benevolence, all efforts to gain a
greater mastery of nature's forces, and thus emancipate the race from
poverty and pestilence, languish feebly, or totally fail, for want of
the resources consumed in the blaze of ostentation. The resources of a
Church that might abolish ignorance and pauperism must be given to
uphold the royal state of lord bishops, who sit in parliament, and make
a heavy incubus on all real progress, obstructing the measures which
might uplift into comfort, decency, a