their characters indelibly blackened. The most appalling stories were also told in the police offices, of public
lodging-houses crammed with both sexes in streets behind one of the greatest London thoroughfares, where
ninety creatures were wont to pass the night in a house without proper accommodation for nine, and where
the rooms overflowed with night-soil. Nor, as if to prove even such horrors capable of aggravation, was
there wanting the contrast of scandalous waste beside these pictures of destitute misery. Two or three days
after refusing to let a vote be passed for occasional loan of a book from the city library to a studiously-inclined
member of corporation, the common councillors of the city of London voted five hundred and twenty-seven
thousand pounds for the continued support of the abominations of a cattle market in the heart of their
crowded streets!

"What, meanwhile, was the spiritual condition of the country thus overburdened with folly and crime? We
may obtain, perhaps, some approximative notion of it by taking the prison commitments of an important
county for the twelve months immediately preceding. They exhibit eight hundred and thirty souls made
amenable during that time to such laws as prevailed. One-third of these had never attended a place of any
kind in which a form of divine worship of any description prevailed. Nearly one-half had never learned to
read. Seven hundred and fifty forlorn wretches among the number were found able to repeat the Lord's
Prayer, but nearly four hundred of them possessed not the slightest notion of its meaning. Six hundred and
twenty-two could repeat the Apostles' Creed, but of these more than one-sixth had no knowledge of the nature,
the works, or even the name of Christ. No one, at the same time, could feel the least surprise at this, who knew
how the spiritual teachers of the day passed their time, and the subjects in which alone they took interest.
They had long abandoned every effort to enlighten the rational beliefs or inculcate the practical duties, for eager
discussion of such questions as whether sermons should be delivered in a surplice, or candles lighted at the
communion-table; and at what period of the rite of baptism the babe was saved from sin's eternal penalties;
and whether Church could act independently of State, and if State had power to sit in judgment on Church?
And while the garrison thus quarrelled and disputed, lo! the enemy were thundering at the gates.

"The state of England in the nineteenth century had retrograded, in a word, to that of Britain at the close
of the sixth century. Of the latter period the chroniclers record that the clergy seldom troubled themselves
much with preaching the faith either to the ignorant Britons or the heathen Saxons, whereupon Pope Gregory
the Great was moved by divine inspiration to undertake the conversion of the island by sending over more
worthy preachers; and over there came accordingly a monk, subsequently bishop and archbishop, and invested
with plenary power over twelve other bishoprics, into which this kingdom was then and there divided by order
of his Holiness. After a lapse of twelve centuries and a half, exactly the same thing now occurred; but,
unhappily for this offending and miserable people, what in its origin was an effort of retrieval, in its renewal was
but the penalty of sin. The intervening centuries counted backward, to depth after depth of degradation; and
in more than equal proportion to the blessings of Christianity which Gregory the Great diffused by a movement
of divine inspiration, were the scandals of Popery which Pius the Little inflicted by means of Doctor Nicolas
Wiseman. No sooner had the new Cardinal Archbishop arrived within the precincts of his Archiepiscopal
diocese, than a compact band of infuriated Westminster doctors of the faith about to be displaced, including
one archdeacon, five canons, and an infinite number of rectors, vicars, subdeans, precentors, minor canons,
professors of divinity, incumbents, and curates, rose en masse under the leadership of the Reverend William
Sewell, and——"

Cetera desunt.

So might the history of our time be written, with not a word of falsehood in the facts, and with not a word
of truth in the inferences. For let the reader take breath, and continue of good heart. The final sentence
against Old England still waits to be pronounced. We have not yet become the serfs of an Italian priest,
nor yet are we obliged to beg our daily bread from the barbarous Russian. The cheerful arithmetic of our
Household Words Lord Granby rejects as distasteful; but to deplore and bemoan a system which is fast
ruining the country solely by relieving its pressure of taxation, is an innocent comfort which no one need
grudge to that extremely self-sufficient young nobleman. Even Lord Stanley begins to have hopes of us;
and to admit that ''the agricultural interest" and " the good of the community" may be separable things. It
is true that certain elderly authorities which warn us of a plague as the first fruit of next year's Exhibition,
also tell us that Free Trade is responsible for all the murders and burglaries. But, on the other hand, the
worthy Mr. Recorder Hill discovers an origin for them less far a-field, and has set a number of intelligent
writers on an eager discussion of their remedy.

Thus already evil turns to good; and it will be safe to predict that, of the crime whose alarming frequency
during the past month struck every one with so much terror, what remains a few months hence will be but the
wholesome example of its detection and punishment. For it is not that such depravity in far greater excess has
not heretofore existed, but that it has never been seen in such startling contrast to the amendment and better
progress of all things else—never tracked with so much vigour, never laid bare with such terrible distinctness.
Not to leave undone but to keep unknown, has been of burglars in past days, as of the Venetian ladies in
lago's time, the best virtue; but it is a virtue which cannot co-exist with true and honest Civilisation. Her
office is the painful but essential one of compromising no unpleasant reality in favour of a less unpleasant
seeming. It is the necessary purification of the Woolwich Academy, which makes its present shame be
seen; as it is from the vigilant watchfulness of men no longer tolerant of the least abuse of authority, that the
exceptional defects of our system of Police are no longer able to conceal themselves. And infinitely
greater and more beneficent are the duties and labours of Civilisation which still wait to be
discharged. She has to attend to the neglected and remember the forgotten. She has to direct misplaced
sympathy into better channels. She has to connect the enjoyments of wealth and success with the higher
sources of content and virtue. In one sense it may be no extravagant charge to attribute to the more rapid
means of accumulating wealth increased temptations and facilities for crime. Upon intellectual cultivation
depends the worth of material prosperity; and this before every other is the consideration which should
occupy the thoughts of all men at present. Religion must be made a practical and intelligible truth; the
poor must be taught as well as fed; and to a sound system of Universal Education we must look for our
only effective antidote to crime and bigotry. We require no other weapon against the Pope and his Cardinal
Archbishop, but most assuredly this weapon will be needed.