Hull, cadets going out
hopelessly forever, emigrants, convicts, missionaries, and all other
absentees, voluntary or involuntary. Tirades upon abject poverty, wanton
affluence, poor laws, mendicancy, and Ireland; not omitting some
thrilling cases of barbaric destitution.

Now come we lawfully to descant upon matters more mental and
sentimental--the _metaphysique_ of the subject--the pleasures and pains
of Home. As thus, most cursorily: the nursery, with its dear innocent
joys; the school-boy, holiday feelings and scholastic cruelties; the
desk-abhorring clerk; the over-worked milliner; the starving family of
factory children, and of agricultural labourers, and of workers in coal
mines and iron furnaces, with earnest exhortations to the rich to pour
their horns of plenty on the poor. England, once a safer and a happier
land, under the law of charity: now fast verging into a despotic
centralized system, kept together by bayonets and constables' staves.
Home a refuge for all; for queens and princes from their cumbrous state,
as well as for clowns from their hedging and ditching. The home of love,
and its thousand blessings, founded on mutual confidence, religion,
open-heartedness, communion of interest, absence of selfishness, and so
on: the honoured father, due subordination, and results; the loving
wife, obedient children, and cheerful servants. Absolute, though most
kind, monarchy the best government for a home; with digressions about
Austria and China, and such laudable paternal rule; and _contra_, bitter
castigation of republican misrule, its evils and their results, for
which see Old Athens and New York, and certain spots half-way between
them.

The pains of home: most various indeed, caused by all sorts of opposite
harms--too much constraint or too little, open bad example or impossible
good example, omissions and commissions, duty relaxed by indulgence, and
duty tightened into tyranny; but mainly and generally attributable to
the non-assertion or other abuse of parental authority. The spoiled
child, and his progress of indulgence, unchecked passions, dissipation,
crime, and ruin. Interested interlopers, as former friends, relatives,
flatterers, and busy parasites, undermining that bond of confidence
without which home falls to pieces; the gloomy spirit of reserve,
discouraging every thing like generous open-heartedness; menial
influences lowering their subject to their own base level; discords,
religious, politic