of their brow and of their soul, Behold, it is
not sport, it is grim earnest, and our back can bear no more! Who
knows not what massacrings and harryings there have been; grinding,
long-continuing, unbearable injustices,--till the heart had to rise in
madness, and some "_Eu Sachsen, nimith euer sachses_, You Saxons, out
with your gully-knives, then!" You Saxons, some 'arrestment,' partial
'arrestment of the Knaves and Dastards' has become indispensable!--The
page of Dryasdust is heavy with such details.

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the
beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of
toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing
over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man
wretched; many men have died; all men must die,--the last exit of us
all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know
not why: to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary,
yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold-universal Laissez-faire:
it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead,
Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull!
This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made.
Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days?
The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.

Never before did I hear of an Irish Widow reduced to 'prove her
sisterhood by dying of typhus-fever and infecting seventeen
persons,'--saying in such undeniable way, "You _see_ I was your
sister!" Sisterhood, brotherhood, was often forgotten; but not till
the rise of these ultimate Mammon and Shotbelt Gospels did I ever see
it so expressly denied. If no pious Lord or _Law-ward_ would remember
it, always some pious Lady ('_Hlaf-dig_,' Benefactress,
'_Loaf-giveress_,' they say she is,--blessings on her beautiful
heart!) was there, with mild mother-voice and hand, to remember it;
some pious thoughtful _Elder_, what we now call 'Prester,' _Presbyter_
or 'Priest,' was there to put all men in mind of it, in the name of
the God who had made all.

Not even in Black Dahomey was it ever, I think, forgotten to the
typhus-fever length. Mungo Park, resourceless, had sunk down to die
under the Negro Village-Tree, a horrible White object in the eyes of
all. But in the poor Black Woman, and her daughter who stood aghast at
him, whose earthly wealth and funded capita