And they smite him beneficently with sore afflictions,and blight his world all into grim frozen ruins round him,--and can make a wandering Exile of their Dante,and a soft-bedded Podesta of Florence,if they wish to get a Divine Comedy out of him.Nay that rather is their way,when they have worthy work for such a man;they scourge him manifoldly to the due pitch,sometimes nearly of despair,that he may search desperately for his work,and find it;they urge him on still with beneficent stripes when needful,as is constantly the case between whiles;and,in fact,have privately decided to reward him with beneficent death by and by,and with money at all.O my benevolent friend,I ho Howard very much;but it is on this side idolatry a long way,to an infinite,but to a decidedly finite extent!And you,--put the modest le Howard,a truly modest man,to the blush,by forcing these reflections on us!
Cholera Doctors,hired to dive into black dens of infection and despair,they,rushing about all day from lane to lane,with their life in their hand,are found to do their function;which is a much more rugged one than Howard's.Or what say we,Cholera Doctors?Ragged losels gathered by beat of drum from the overcrowded streets of cities,and drilled a little and dressed in red,do they stand fire in an uncensurable manner;and handsomely give their life,if needful,at the rate of a shilling per day?Human virtue,if we went down to the roots of it,is so rare.The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun:raw materials,--O woe,and loss,and scandal thrice and threefold,that they so seldom are elaborated,and built into a result!that they lie yet unelaborated,and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions,fermenting,festering;and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue!A Mrs.Manning "dying game,"--alas,is that the foiled potentiality of a kind of heroine too?a heroic Judith,a mother of the Gracchi ,but a hideous murderess,fit to be the mother of hyenas!To such extent can potentialities be foiled.Education,kingship,command,--where is it,whither has it fled?Woe a thousand times,that this,which is the task of all kings,captains,priests,public speakers,land-owners,book-writers,mill-owners,and persons possessing or pretending to possess authority among mankind,--is left neglected among them all;and instead of it so little done but protocolling,black-or-white surplicing,partridge-shooting,parliamentary eloquence and popular twaddle-literature;with such results as we see!--Howard abated the Jail-fever;but it seems to me he has been the inent cause of a far more distressing fever which rages high just ;what we may call the Benevolent-Platform Fever.Howard is to be regarded as the unlucky fountain of that tumultuous frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality,"abolition of punishment,"all-absorbing "prison-discipline,"and general morbid sympathy,instead of hearty hatred,for scoundrels;which is threatening to drown human society as in deluges,and leave,instead of an "edifice of society"fit for the habitation of men,a continent of fetid ooze inhabitable only by mud-gods and creatures that walk upon their belly.Few things more distress a thinking soul at this time.
Most sick am I,O friends,of this sugary disastrous jargon of philanthropy,the reign of love,new era of universal brotherhood,and Paradise to the Well-deserving but Paradise to All-and-sundry,which possesses the benighted minds of men and women in our day.My friends,I think you are much mistaken about Paradise!"Paradise for anybody:he that can do without Paradise,go his ways:"suppose you tried that for a while!I reckon that the safer version.Unhappy sugary brethren,this is all untrue,this other;contrary to the fact;a tatter of it will hang together in the wind and weather of fact.In brotherhood with the base and foolish I,for one,do mean to live.in brotherhood with them was life hitherto worth much to me;in pity,in hope yet quite swallowed of disgust,--otherwise in enmity that must last through eternity,in unappeasable aversion shall I have to live with these!
Brotherhood?be the thought far from me.They are Adam's children,--alas yes,I well remember that,and never shall forget it;hence this rage and sorrow.But they have gone over to the dragons;they have quitted the Father's house,and set up with the Old Serpent:till they return,how can they be brothers?