To see our Supreme Scoundrel hung upon the gallows,alas,that is far from us just !There is a worst man in England,too,--curious to think of,--whom it would be inexpressibly advantageous to lay hold of,and hang,the first of all.But we do k him with the least certainty,the least approach even to a guess,--such buzzards and dullards and poor children of the Dusk are we,in spite of our Statistics,Unshackled Presses,and Torches of Kledge;--eagles soaring sunward,brothers of the lightnings and the radiances we;a dim horn-eyed,owl-population,intent mainly on the catching of mice!Alas,the supreme scoundrel,alike with the supreme hero,is very far from being kn.have we the smallest apparatus for dealing with either of them,if he were kn.Our supreme scoundrel sits,Iconjecture,well-cushioned,in high places,at this time;rolls softly through the world,and lives a prosperous gentleman;instead of sinking him in peat-bogs,we mount the brazen image of him on high columns:such is the world's temporary judgment about its supreme scoundrels;a mad world,my masters.To get the supreme scoundrel always accurately the first hanged,this,which presupposes that the supreme hero were always the first promoted,this were precisely the millennium itself,clear evidence that the millennium had come:alas,we must forbear hope of this.Much water will run by before we see this.
And yet to quit all aim towards it;to go blindly floundering along,wrapt up in clouds of horsehair,bombazine,and sheepskin officiality,oblivious that there exists such an aim;this is indeed fatal.In every human law there must either exist such an aim,or else the law is a human but a diabolic one.
Diabolic,I say:quantity of bombazine,or lawyers'wigs,three-readings,and solemn trumpeting and bow-wowing in high places or in low,can hide from me its frightful infernal tendency;--bound,and sinking at all moments gradually to Gehenna,this "law;"and dragging down much with it!"To decree injustice by a law :"inspired Prophets have long since seen,what every clear soul may still see,that of all Anarchies and Devil-worships there is e like this;that this is the "Throne of Iniquity"set up in the name of the Highest,the human Apotheosis of Anarchy itself."Quiet Anarchy,"you exultingly say?Yes;quiet Anarchy,which the longer it sits "quiet"will have the frightfuler account to settle at last.For every doit of the account,as I often say,will have to be settled one day,as sure as God lives.Principal,and compound interest rigorously computed;and the interest is at a terrible rate per cent in these cases!Alas,the aspect of certain beatified Anarchies,sitting "quiet;"and of others in a state of infernal explosion for sixty years back:this,the one view our Europe offers at present,makes these days very sad.--My unfortunate philanthropic friends,it is this long-continued oblivion of the soul of law that has reduced the Criminal Question to such a pass among us.Many other things have come,and are coming,for the same sad reason,to a pass!the supreme scoundrel have our laws aimed at;but,in an uncertain fitful manner,at the inferior or lowest scoundrel,who robs shop-tills and puts the skin of mankind in danger.How can Parliament get through the Criminal Question?Parliament,oblivious of Heavenly Law,will find itself in hopeless reductio ad absurdum in regard to innumerable other questions,--in regard to all questions whatsoever by and by.There will be existence possible for Parliament on these current terms.
Parliament,in its law-makings,must really try to attain some vision again of what Heaven's Laws are.A thing easy to do;a thing requiring sad sincerity of heart,reverence,pious earnestness,valiant manful wisdom;--qualities overabundant in Parliament just ,out of it,I fear.
Adieu,my friends.My anger against you is gone;my sad reflections on you,and on the depths to which you and I and all of us are sunk in these strange times,are to be uttered at present.You would have saved the Sarawak Pirates,then?The Almighty Maker is wroth that the Sarawak cut-throats,with their poisoned spears,are away?What must his wrath be that the thirty thousand Needlewomen are still here,and the question of "prevenient grace"yet settled!O my friends,in sad earnest,sad and deadly earnest,there much needs that God would mend all this,and that we should help him to mend it!--And don't you think,for one thing,"Farmer Hodge's horses"in the Sugar Islands are pretty well "emancipated"?My clear opinion farther is,we had better quit the Scoundrel-province of Reform;better close that under hatches,in some rapid summary manner,and go elsewhither with our Reform efforts.A whole world,for want of Reform,is drowning and sinking;threatening to swamp itself into a Stygian quagmire,uninhabitable by any le-minded man.Let us to the well-heads,I say;to the chief fountains of these waters of bitterness;and there strike home and dig!To puddle in the embouchures and drowned outskirts,and ulterior and ultimate issues and cloacas of the affair:what profit can there be in that?hing to be saved there;hing to be fished up there,except,with endless peril and spread of pestilence,a miscellany of broken waifs and dead dogs!In the name of Heaven,quit that!