Unfortunately, if there be something to lament in the condition of our neighbours, there is also something to humiliate on turning our attention homeward. In a variety of things which are required to give symmetry and safety to the social fabric, there appears to be an almost systematic and hopeless stoppage.
Nearly the whole of the law and equity administration of England seems to be a contrivance to put justice beyond reach; and whether any substantial remedy will be applied during the present generation may be seriously doubted.
It is universally admitted that, for the sake of the public health, interment in London and other large cities should be legally prohibited; and that various other sanitary arrangements in relation to these populous localities should be enforced. Yet, legislation on this subject seems to be beyond the grasp of statesmen.
The system of poor-laws throughout the United Kingdom is, with the best intentions, a cause of widely-spread demoralisation. These laws, in their operation, are, in fact, a scheme for robbing the industrious to support the idle. But where is the legislator who will attack and remodel this preposterous system?
The prevention of crime is another of our formidable social difficulties. Every one sees how young and petty criminals grow up to be old and great ones. It is admitted that the punishment of crime, after disorderly habits are confirmed, is no sufficient check; and that, if the evil is to be cured, we must go at once to its root. But when or how is this to be done? Again, there is a call for that scarcest of all thingsstatesmanship.
The bitterness of sectarian contention is another of the things which one feels to be derogatory to an age of general progress. No longer are men permitted to kill each other in vindication of opinion, but how mournful to witness persecution by inuendo, vituperation, and even falsehood. Individuals and classes are seen bombarding each other in vile, abusive, and certainly most unchristian language, all ostensibly in the name of a religion which has for a fundamental principle, an utter repudiation of strife! Whether any amendment is to be looked for in this department of affairs within the next twenty years is exceedingly uncertain.
In the roll of disheartening circumstances in our social condition, it would be unpardonable to omit the enormities of intemperance, which, though groaned over day after day, remain pretty much what they have been for years; and it is to be feared, that so long as reformers confine themselves to attacking mere symptoms, instead of going to the foundation of the evila deficiency of self-respect, growing out of a want of instruction in things proper to be known, and for which the education of the country makes no provisionall will be in vain. How far there will prevail a more enlarged view of this painful subject, is not discoverable from the present temper
of parties.
The legislative conservation of ignorance in the humbler classes of the community, to which reference has just been made, is surely a blot on our social economy. It is seemingly easier to girdle the globe with a wire, than to make sure that every child in Her Majesty's dominions shall receive the simplest elements of education. Within the sphere of the mechanic or the chemist, flights beyond the bounds of imagination may be pursued without restraint, and indeed with commendation; but anything in social economics, however philanthropic in design and beneficial in tendency, falls into the category of disputation and obstruction; and, worst of all, education, on which so much depends, is, through the debates of contending 'interests,' kept at a point utterly inadequate for the general enlightenment and wellbeing.
Thus, many matters of moment are either at a stand, or advancing by feeble and hesitating steps, and the distance to be ultimately reached remains vague and undefinable. At the same time, it is well to be assured that improvements, moral and social, are really in progress; and that, on the whole, society is on the move not in a retrograde direction. Even with a stone tied to its leg, the world, as we have said, contrives 'to get on some way or other.'
THE WRECKER
The village of Montreaux was almost wholly inhabited by men, who made wrecking their profession. It was a collection of miserable huts, built principally out of the broken materials of the various vessels driven on shore; and ostensibly inhabited by fishermen, who, however, rarely resorted to the deep, except when a long continuance of fine weather rendered their usual avocation less prosperous than usual. They consisted in all of about thirty families, wreckers, for the most part, from father to son, and even from mother to daughterfor women joined freely in the atrocious trade. Atrocious indeed! for murder necessarily accompanied pillage, and it rarely happened that many of the crew and passengers of the unfortunate vessels escaped alive. Bodies were indeed found along the shore; but even if they exhibited the marks of blows, the sea and the rocks got the credit of the deed.