t looks
inwards to his own heart for the consciousness of these falsehoods. Look
at this, we repeat, and you will surely feel yourself forced to
say--not that there is no sympathy between these men, but there sits the
oppressor and there stands the oppressed.

But even this is not all. Bestow a still more searching glance upon
the scene. Here is more than invective; more than the imputation of
dishonesty and fraud; more than the cruel defamation of character in the
presence of so many. Mark the words of that agent or landlord again. He
is sealing the fate of this struggling man; he tells him he is to have
no home--no house to shelter himself, his wife, and their children; that
he must be dispossessed, ejected, turned out upon the world, without
friends to support or aid him, or the means to sustain their physical
existence. Hear all this, and mark the brow of that denounced man;
observe how it knits and darkens; how firmly he compressess his
lips, and with what a long, determined, gloomy gaze he surveys his
denouncer--observe all this, we repeat; and need you feel surprised,
at finding yourself compelled to go still farther, and say there sits a
doomed man and there most assuredly stands his murderer.

Let it not be supposed that we are capable of justifying murder, or the
shedding of human blood; but we are palliating, and ever shall palliate
that crime in the humble man, which originates in the oppression
of the great man. Is the act which banishes happiness and
contentment--introduces poverty, misery, destitution--which scatters
out of the heart all the little amenities and sweet endearments of
life--which wastes away the strength of the spirit, and paralyzes that
of the hand--which dims the eye and gives paleness to the cheek, and by
combining all these together makes home--yes, home, the trysting place
of all the affections, a thing to be thought of only with dread--an
asylum for the miseries of life;--is the act, we say, which inflicts
upon a human being, or a human family, this scathing and multitudinous
curse--no crime? In the sight of God and in the sight of man is it no
crime? Yes! In the sight of God and man it is a deep, an awful, and a
most heartless crime! To return, however, to our rent day. The whole
morning was unseasonably cold and stormy, and as there was but little
shelter about the place, we need scarcely say, that the poor creatures
who were congregated before the door were compelled to bear the f