attended by such peculiar horrors that its memory is likely
to be perpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut up in a room
containing not enough air to supply one-tenth their number. The
unfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but, as
the agonies of suffocation began to take hold on them, they forgot all
else, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for himself,
and against all others, to force a way to one of the small apertures
of the prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air.
It was a struggle in which men became beasts, and the recital of its
horrors by the few survivors so shocked our forefathers that for a
century later we find it a stock reference in their literature as a
typical illustration of the extreme possibilities of human misery, as
shocking in its moral as its physical aspect. They could scarcely have
anticipated that to us the Black Hole of Calcutta, with its press of
maddened men tearing and trampling one another in the struggle to win
a place at the breathing holes, would seem a striking type of the
society of their age. It lacked something of being a complete type,
however, for in the Calcutta Black Hole there were no tender women, no
little children and old men and women, no cripples. They were at least
all men, strong to bear, who suffered.

"When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been speaking
was prevalent up to the end of the nineteenth century, while to us the
new order which succeeded it already seems antique, even our parents
having known no other, we cannot fail to be astounded at the
suddenness with which a transition so profound beyond all previous
experience of the race must have been effected. Some observation of
the state of men's minds during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century will, however, in great measure, dissipate this astonishment.
Though general intelligence in the modern sense could not be said to
exist in any community at that time, yet, as compared with previous
generations, the one then on the stage was intelligent. The inevitable
consequence of even this comparative degree of intelligence had been a
perception of the evils of society, such as had never before been
general. It is quite true that these evils had been even worse, much
worse, in previous ages. It was the increased intelligence of the
masses which made the difference, as the dawn reveals the squalor of
surroundings which in the da