hese reflections on us!

Cholera Doctors, hired to dive into black dens of infection and despair,
they, rushing about all day from lane to lane, with their life in their
hand, are found to do their function; which is a much more rugged one
than Howard's. Or what say we, Cholera Doctors? Ragged losels gathered
by beat of drum from the overcrowded streets of cities, and drilled a
little and dressed in red, do not they stand fire in an uncensurable
manner; and handsomely give their life, if needful, at the rate of a
shilling per day? Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is
not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant
as the light of the sun: raw materials,--O woe, and loss, and scandal
thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into
a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of
wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as
energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue! A Mrs. Manning "dying
game,"--alas, is not that the foiled potentiality of a kind of heroine
too? Not a heroic Judith, not a mother of the Gracchi now, but a
hideous murderess, fit to be the mother of hyenas! To such extent can
potentialities be foiled. Education, kingship, command,--where is it,
whither has it fled? Woe a thousand times, that this, which is the
task of all kings, captains, priests, public speakers, land-owners,
book-writers, mill-owners, and persons possessing or pretending to
possess authority among mankind,--is left neglected among them all;
and instead of it so little done but protocolling, black-or-white
surplicing, partridge-shooting, parliamentary eloquence and popular
twaddle-literature; with such results as we see!--

Howard abated the Jail-fever; but it seems to me he has been the
innocent cause of a far more distressing fever which rages high just
now; what we may call the Benevolent-Platform Fever. Howard is to be
regarded as the unlucky fountain of that tumultuous frothy ocean-tide
of benevolent sentimentality, "abolition of punishment," all-absorbing
"prison-discipline," and general morbid sympathy, instead of hearty
hatred, for scoundrels; which is threatening to drown human society as
in deluges, and leave, instead of an "edifice of society" fit for
the habitation of men, a continent of fetid ooze inhabitable only by
mud-gods and creatures that walk upon their belly. Few things more
distress a thinking soul a