-so many directions
by which to advise his course. With us there is no risk of doing
anything inappropriate, or incompatible with your station, if you will
only suffer yourself to be borne along on the current. Your tailor
knows not only the precise shade of colour which suits your
complexion, but, as if by intuition, he divines the exact cut that
suits your condition in life. Your coachmaker, in the same way, augurs
from the tone of your voice, and the _contour_ of your features, the
shade of colour for your carriage; and should you, by any misfortune,
happen to be knighted, the Herald's-office deduce, from the very
consonants of your name, the _quantum_ of emblazonry they can bestow
on you, and from how far back among the burglars and highwaymen of
antiquity they can venture to trace you. Should you, however, still
more unfortunately, through any ignorance of etiquette, or any
inattention to those minor forms of breeding with which every native
is conversant, offer umbrage, however slight and unintentional, to
those dread functionaries, the "new police;" were you by chance to
gaze longer into a jeweller's window than is deemed decorous; were you
to fall into any reverie which should induce you to slacken your pace,
perchance to hum a tune, and thus be brought before the awful "Sir
Peter," charged by "G 743" with having impeded the passengers--collected
a crowd--being of suspicious appearance, and having refused "to tell
who your friends were"--the odds are strongly against you that you
perform a hornpipe upon the treadmill, or be employed in that very
elegant chemical analysis, which consists in the extraction of
magnesia from oyster-shells.

Now, let any man consider for a moment what a large, interesting, and
annually-increasing portion of our population there is, who, from
certain peculiarities attending their early condition, have never been
blessed with relatives or kindred--who, having no available father and
mother, have consequently no uncles, aunts, or cousins, nor any good
friends. Here the law presses with a fearful severity upon the
suffering and the afflicted, not upon the guilty and offending. The
state has provided no possible contingencies by which such persons are
to escape. A man can no more create a paternity than he can make a new
planet. I have already said that with wealth at his disposal, ancestry
and forefathers are easily procured. He can have them of any age, of
any country, of any condition