struck these good men that no
world, or thing here below, ever fell into misery, without having first
fallen into folly, into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it, by adopting
as a law of conduct what was not a law, but the reverse of one; and
that, till its folly, till its sin be cast out of it, there is not the
smallest hope of its misery going,--that not for all the charity and
rose-water in the world will its misery try to go till then!

This is a sad error; all the sadder as it is the error chiefly of the
more humane and noble-minded of our generation; among whom, as we
said, or elsewhere not at all, the cause of real Reform must expect its
servants. At present, and for a long while past, whatsoever young soul
awoke in England with some disposition towards generosity and social
heroism, or at lowest with some intimation of the beauty of such
a disposition,--he, in whom the poor world might have looked for a
Reformer, and valiant mender of its foul ways, was almost sure to become
a Philanthropist, reforming merely by this rose-water method. To admit
that the world's ways are foul, and not the ways of God the Maker, but
of Satan the Destroyer, many of them, and that they must be mended or
we all die; that if huge misery prevails, huge cowardice, falsity,
disloyalty, universal Injustice high and low, have still longer
prevailed, and must straightway try to cease prevailing: this is what
no visible reformer has yet thought of doing: All so-called "reforms"
hitherto are grounded either on openly admitted egoism (cheap bread to
the cotton-spinner, voting to those that have no vote, and the like),
which does not point towards very celestial developments of the
Reform movement; or else upon this of remedying social injustices by
indiscriminate contributions of philanthropy, a method surely still more
unpromising. Such contributions, being indiscriminate, are but a new
injustice; these will never lead to reform, or abolition of injustice,
whatever else they lead to!

Not by that method shall we "get round Cape Horn," by never such
unanimity of voting, under the most approved Phantasm Captains! It is
miserable to see. Having, as it were, quite lost our way round Cape
Horn, and being sorely "admonished" by the Iceberg and other dumb
councillors, the pilots,--instead of taking to their sextants, and
asking with a seriousness unknown for a long while, What the Laws of
wind and water, and of Earth and of Heaven are,--decide that