is a
terrible amount, not of pauperism, but of hard-struggling poverty,
massed up in the crowded, wretched, but high-priced tenements of
great towns, and maintaining a forlorn life by such incessant, cruel
labour as is not exacted from convicted criminals in any English
prison. London, where this kind of misery is inevitably at its
height, receives every week an accession of a thousand persons, who
doubtless, in a great majority of cases, simply help to glut the
already crowded labour market and still further lower the wages of
the workers; and the other great towns in like manner grow, while the
rural population remains stagnant or lessens. Agricultural distress,
which helps to keep the tide of emigration high, also accounts in
part for this singular, undesirable displacement of population; while
recent testimony points to the fact that the terribly unsanitary and
inefficient housing of the rural poor does much to drive the best and
most laborious members of that class away from the villages and
fields which might otherwise be the homes of happy and peaceful
industry. For this form of evil, in town and country, private
greed--frequently shown by small proprietors, who have never learnt
that property has duties as well as rights--is very largely
responsible; for how many other of the evils we have to deplore is
not the greed of gain responsible?

The sins of the age are still much the same sins that the Laureate
roughly arraigned when the Crimean war broke our long peace;
denouncing the race for riches which turned men into "pickpockets,
each hand lusting for all that is not its own;" denouncing the cruel
selfishness of rich and poor as the vilest kind of civil war, being
"underhand, not openly bearing the sword." We had made the blessings
of peace a curse, he told us, in those days, "when only the ledger
lived, and when only not all men lied; when the poor were hovelled
and hustled together, each sex, like swine; when chalk and alum and
plaster were sold to the poor for bread, and the spirit of murder
worked in the very means of life." Yet those very days saw the
uprising of a whole generation of noble servants of humanity,
resolute to tight and overcome the rampant evils that surrounded
them. And though we would avoid the error of praising our own epoch
as though it alone were humane, as though we only, "the latest seed
of Time, have loved the people well," and shown our love by deeds;
though we would not deny that