escent. The true movement of the last
fifteen years has been the progress of one idea,--Social Reform. There
it advances with steady and noiseless march behind every louder question
of constitutional change. Let us do justice to our time. There have been
periods of more brilliant action on the destinies of States, but there
is no time visible in History in which there was so earnest and general
a desire to improve the condition of the great body of the people. In
every circle of the community that healthful desire is astir. It unites
in one object men of parties the most opposed; it affords the most
attractive nucleus for public meetings; it has cleansed the statute-book
from blood; it is ridding the world of the hangman. It animates the
clergy of all sects in the remotest districts; it sets the squire on
improving cottages and parcelling out allotments. Schools rise in every
village; in books the lightest, the Grand Idea colours the page, and
bequeaths the moral. The Government alone (despite the professions on
which the present Ministry was founded) remains unpenetrated by the
common genius of the age; but on that question, with all the subtleties
it involves, and the experiments it demands,--not indeed according to
the dreams of an insane philosophy, but according to the immutable laws
which proportion the rewards of labour to the respect for property,--a
Government must be formed at last.

There is in this work a subtler question suggested, but not
solved,--that question which perplexes us in the generous ardour of our
early youth,--which, unsatisfactory as all metaphysics, we rather escape
from than decide as we advance in years; namely, make what laws we
please, the man who lives within the pale can be as bad as the man
without. Compare the Paul Clifford of the fiction with the William
Brandon,--the hunted son with the honoured father, the outcast of the
law with the dispenser of the law, the felon with the judge; and as at
the last they front each other,--one on the seat of justice, the other
at the convict's bar,--who can lay his hand on his heart and say that
the Paul Clifford is a worse man than the William Brandon.

There is no immorality in a truth that enforces this question; for it
is precisely those offences which society cannot interfere with that
society requires fiction to expose. Society is right, though youth is
reluctant to acknowledge it. Society can form only certain regulations
necessary for its