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SOCIAL EVILS.

NO. I. HOME SLAVERY, AND ITS ATTENDANT VICES.

THE eloquent biographer of the mad Macedonian, has bequeathed to posterity a graphic account of the horrible licentiousness which reigned in Babylon during the thirty-four days that the army of Alexander sojourned there; and the horror inspired by the recital is increased, when we discover that the unbridled depravity which welcomed the arrival and the residence of the foreign troops, was not merely a momentary outburst of the flame of vice, that would blaze up for a period with destroying effect, and then expire for want of nourishment; but the usual daily burning powers of evil which was never, in Babylon, allowed to die, while Babylon itself existed; and whose altar-fire was tended with more watchfulness than that which guarded the sacred and living embers on the shrine of the vestal goddess.

Babylon is no more! and its very site is a matter of dispute. The memory of its unnumbered sins, and its inexpressible wickedness, has outlived even the traditions of the situation of that old scat of gorgeous vice, and throne of dazzling iniquity. The storied page of that vice and that iniquity has made many a pharisee thank heaven that, in these Christian days, he was not as that poor publican was; and that the spirit of modern refinement, and modern morality, could never admit the probability of the real existence of a modern Babylon. But, alas! we deceive ourselves if we join in this belief. The very appellation of modern Babylon, which has been applied in jest to our own Metropolis, may cling to it with the sober sadness of truth; the same, perhaps a denser, atmosphere of sin surrounds us. If we purchase not our condemnation by committing the vices which made the Queen of Eastern cities infamous, we ensure it by transgressions of no less deadly a nature. If we have more refinement of action, we have also less ignorance of effect. Beneath the light of Scripture truth, we see yawning before us that dark and dismal gulf into which they walked, blind with drunkenness and heathenism; and if that light be not perceptible, and become not to us a beacon and a saving light, it is because we are as men who pass their nights at noisy banquets and riotous feastings, and who become so accustomed to the borrowed light which gives additional splendour to their carousing, that they are not aware of the arrival of the dawn-that pure and cool messenger, who, when he makes his presence felt, gives double hideousness to those who have been worshipping, like Israel's children, before earthly shrines.

The cheerful and innocent circles congregated in happy homes, will reluctantly yield credence to the horrible fact, that there never passes a single minute of time, in which some crime or unspeakable vice is not acted or conceived, in London. Guilt, there, is ever awake and active; from sunrise till eve, and throughout the dark hours of night, till morning once more breaks over the large city, there is being carried on a never-dying, an uninterrupted worship of every species of sin. There are classes of men, and of women too, in the Metro

polis, whose manners, habits, means of living, and even language, would appear as strange, incomprehensible, and unheard of, as those of some newly-discovered, semi-brutish tribe. There are districts, too, in this civilised city in which we dwell, through which it would be perhaps more dangerous to person and property to pass, than it would for an unarmed traveller to cross the desert from Tunis to Timbuctoo. We are better acquainted with the topography of either of these towns than we are with the "whereabout" of the districts of the Metropolis which gives refuge to the poverty, the dirt, the despair, and the guilt of no inconsiderable portion of its inhabitants. There exists no poetry of life; the stern and worst realities of existence alone linger there. It is no Alsatia, with a show at least of discipline, and something like fellowship, though in a bad spirit. In their retreats, if they may be so named, lurk men whose only occupation is to devise means of waging successful war against society; and whose only pleasures are in the evil triumphs which they not rarely achieve, and in the brutal excesses which attend their celebration. The walls of our venerable abbey fling their shadow over one of those districts of the abandoned sons and daughters of sin; and the pealing organ, whose thunders are aroused in honour of the Deity, is overcome by the billows of sound which roll from the adjacent Hell, and which split into discordant echoes against the gates and pinnacles of the temple of the Lord.

Such are the localities of vice. There does she have her wretched dwelling-place, and enjoy her ovations; and, woe to them who are constrained to dwell with Mesech, and to have their habitation among these tents of Kedar. Turn we from them to the mansions of the men of "cheerful yesterdays, and confident to-morrows." It is turning away from sin and all its repulsive accessories, to where reigns, often a reality, sometimes an appearance of refinement, religion, innocence, and that fair group of attendant sisters whom mortals recognize under the appellation of the Virtues.

The space which lies between these two extremes of society, is of far less extent than, without reflection, we might suppose. They are bound by a chain of which the links are not long; and the connecting bond is that portion of our fellow-creatures, who would be but too happy might they be allowed to retain their position; and but too many of whom are driven by the guilty thoughtlessness, and unintentional oppression of the upper classes, to find a home, if that expressive word may be so desecrated, amid the deprivations and the wretchedness of society's outcasts. Some indeed live on, struggling in unequal fight, snatch their daily bread, and struggle again for a another day's, not life, but existence. The happier portion, not even effecting so much as this, struggle, not for existence, but against being dragged down by sin. Famine and death appear to them arrayed in beauty, and they go down to the grave serenely, having fought the good fight, and full of the assured hope, that what they lacked for a season here, shall be made up to them in compensating measure, and for ever, hereafter.

How varied are the imports which attend the word slavery. Over

the western ocean, and under men who acknowledge themselves Christians, and who are at least the subjects of a Christian government, it is endless wrong, and oppression. There avarice holds the scourge in his hand; and stripes, and burnings, and wounds, and lingering death, make up that dire word. In the countries of the East, the slave finds a more merciful task-master in the luxurious and infidel Moslem, than his distant, yet fellow-victim experiences, in his civilized and Christian owner. For ignominy and bodily suffering, and the hope of liberty all but extinguished within his darkened and despairing soul, he sees comparative ease, comfort, consideration, the prospect of advancement, and freedom to be attained, if he possesses but ability, energy, and perseverance to tread the path, under all circumstances too long, but which will ultimately lead him from the cage of the captive slave to the palace of a Joseph in Egypt.

But there exist other slaves beside the purchased or captured bond slave. Thierry, in his graphic account of the Norman conquest, says, that there was never known to be a villain (or peasant serf) in Scotland, nor any example of a human creature being sold with the land. There is a legitimate source of pride to that fair country in this fact; the more, that it occurred at a time, when probably no other could make the same boast. In the usually accepted sense of the term, there is at this moment no slave breathing within the imperial dominions of Great Britain, while in its true meaning there are thousands groaning beneath a labour which is intolerable, sinking under a cruelty perhaps unconsciously inflicted, and extending their gaunt arms, and raising their blood-shot eyes, and crying for aid, which, if not refused them, is so long in reaching its objects, that ere its end is attained the victim hath often surrendered to despair, cursed God, and died.

In speaking of home slavery, and the vices attendant on it, my object is less to describe them than to direct attention to their existence. Next to ocular testimony, the best means of obtaining a knowledge of these horrors is by a painful perusal of the Reports of Parliamentary Commissioners, and an examination of the mass of overwhelming and astounding evidence brought before. them. Of two classes of society alone-the one administering to our wants, the other gratifying the calls of luxury and extravagancethe dark-minded slaves of our collieries, and the pale-faced victims who earn disease and death in the work rooms of fashion; the horrors and wrongs that are told harrow the soul. This toil, ill rewarded-so ill, as in most instances, to be inadequate for the support of existence by fair and honest means-their health, their means of preserving, and their attempts to recover it, disregarded or denied; and the amount of labour demanded of them so great, that the utmost strength and goodwill faint before it, and life itself perishes beneath the pressure. With all this, moreover, there is such an amount of ignorance of all that is vital to man, that the enemies of our religion, and our holy Church, ask in scorn for some proofs of the influences of our faith, and our ministers, in forming the religious principles and strengthening the virtuous dispositions of

the people. And in the moment of asking for these proofs, they deny their existence, and point out the sad truth, that among the large masses of the lower orders in England, there is an utter ignorance of the very fundamental articles of the Christian faith; the very name of the Redeemer unknown, and, consequently, all unknown; and men, say they, are tossed about in a sea of iniquity, while they are plagued with the pestilence of the most degrading vices. Where indeed is the soundness of the boast, that we are the most enlightened, as well as the most powerful people in the world? Nor could our enemies desire that a greater calamity should fall upon us, than that which has visited so large a portion among us— darkness of mind, and hardness of heart.

The evidence of the witness, the remonstrance of the philosopher, the pen of the story-teller, the verses of the poet, have all been called into action to illustrate, expose, and condemn the hard course of life to which insatiate and thoughtless avarice has compelled the operative at the loom, and the collier in the pit. Indignant voices, too, have been raised in behalf of those unhappy females, who, at the expense of all that can make life merely tolerable, furnish the full and fancydress glories of our bals costumes, and our intellect-slaying routes. The author of a clever and useful little work called "The Pageant," has woven therein a story serving to picture the sufferings of the over-worked young dress-makers of the metropolis, and some large provincial towns, and to gain the sympathy for them of those placed in the upper ranks of life, to whom they are chiefly indebted for the sacrifices they make and the crueltics they endure.

Never was sympathy invoked for any class of beings that stood in more desperate and immediate need of it. Every season of London fashionable life passes over them with a progress as bloody as that of the car of Juggernaut. The return of each such period is to them to at least the most delicate, who are not, on that account, the least tried among them—the re-appearance of the angel of death, waiting to snatch his victims, and never retiring without his destined prey. The announcement of the renewal of those brilliant assemblies, to participate in which is to make bright eyes more bright, youthful feelings more delicious, and young hearts more bounding, produces only withering and sickly sensations in the breasts of the real slaves of the lamp; for then ensue those long successive nights and days of uninterrupted application to which they are tied down by the double chains of the vanity of their patrons, and the avarice of their employers-a period of suffering unbroken by enjoyment ; with scanty sustenance, bad in quality, and partaken of hastily, and at ill-regulated periods; then are laid the foundations of those diseases which end in misery or death; the hardly-earned remuneration for all which wretchedness is not a tithe of the light-gained wages of easy and tempting vice.

These things must be looked to: these things must be altered, or

"The Pageant; or, Pleasure and its Price." By the Rev. F. Paget. One vol. 12mic. London: J. Burns.

our modern Babylon will exceed in the measure of her iniquity her old and guilty prototype. Avarice and vanity-this truth cannot be too often repeated-are the foundations from which spring an awful structure of sin and suffering. There is a feeling rank among us, which is destroying all the healthy sources of society-the ill-born and bad ambition of every class to vie with, or to excel, the class above them. This feeling, in its foolishness, demands a wasteful expenditure, of which the operative is the greatest and most innocent victim; and, in its eager vanity, it exacts sacrifices, the results of which are best seen in the reports which unveil the horrors of the fashionable work-rooms. The first step towards an alleviation, or a cure the first effectual means to aid the Legislature in a perfect emancipation of the victims of whom we are speaking, is for individuals to become more content, and less ambitious. Emulation is no bad or undesirable thing in society, but it is envy which is slaying us all. Nor let any one think that individual exertion in such a case is at all profitless, or ineffectual. We are not true to ourselves if we either think or act thus; and to be true to one's self, and to the idea of manhood within us, is, according to good old Herder, the very consistence of all morality. Individual exertion may do much. I believe, for instance, that every man who meets evil by good, and who returns a soft answer to a harsh remark, is doing something to bring about that condition of society which is to be the harbinger of the reign of Christ on earth. For such exertion to be aroused, it is only necessary that each individual should ponder over these momentous things; for thought is the mother of action, and from action, well directed, springs a long line of fair and happy results.

Unless some interference be made for the protection of the defenceless classes of society, the limits of these asylums for vice, which I have already mentioned, will be frightfully extended. At the side of the over-worked and ill-requited operative stand drunken rebellion and ill-featured violence, tempting him to wrong, that at least promises a seductive measure of gain; and when we hear of the miserable pittance offered to females for twenty hours' work, and see how many of them prefer, in consequence, the practice of a life of acknowledged and professional profligacy, we need not ask what tempting spirit has been busy at their ear, and induced them only to change one tyranny for another, and a worse.

A decrease of labour, affording time for repose and improvement, is the first thing needful. And it is gratifying to know that a decrease in the period of labour will ensure an increase of production. This has been found at the cotton manufactory of Wesserling, where a reduction of half an hour daily in the hours of labour of the workmen in the spinning department, is declared, from the testimony of the managers of the establishment, to have been followed by an increase of one twenty-fourth in the produce; thus giving an entire day in every month of working days, to the benefit of the proprietors. This is an encouraging fact, and its promulgation may be made the means of procuring a great boon to a suffering people. The nation itself is so convulsed by conflicting political interests, and important

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