The Sun.
London, England, 1861-06-17 00:00:00

In Judea the people were divided into tribes of
kindred. In Sparta the commonwealth at large
provided for and took possession of all the children
of the State. In Athens each citizen was familiarly
known to every other. In Rome the same super-
vision existed during the era of the Republic. We
have no similar mechanism whatever. Long ago,
in England, a masterless slave was hanged as
dangerous to society. Now, we allow the dissolute
to rove about without visible means, and have
ceased to commit them as rogues and vagabonds.
We are beginning to see that this system will no
longer do, and these " Waust improvements Maum,"
as Cobbett called the " progress of the age," are
anything but changes for the better. Laissez-faire,
a sound principle in political, is fallacious when
applied to social economics. To leave children, the
ignorant or the depraved, alone, is simply to hand
them over to the Devil. We have too long con-
demned ourselves to imprisonment in an enchanted
castle of formulas. We are like the cock in the
centre of a mere linear circle of chalk, which is
incarcerated by the simple fancy that he cannot fly
over it. The " liberty of the subject is a dogma
that has taken such fast hold of us that we mistake
it for the polemical doctrine of the freedom of the
will ; and decline to arm society with any effec-
tive preventive or radically anticipatory remedial
power over vice and crime. All our social econo-
mics are upon an imperial scale, centralising and
massing what should be disintegrated and paro-
chialised. When Mrs. Warren was complimented
on the lyrics illustrative of her husband's blacking,
she explained, " We keeps a poet as does them there
things." We do not personally reform our neigh-
bourhood ; we pay somebody else to do it. There
is no bond between ourselves and our poorer neigh-
bours, but a town missionary, a Bible reader, the
relieving officer, or the constable. Our charity is
vicarious, and our sympathy by deputy. If
Lazarus at our gate be starving, there is the union ;
if sick, the hospital ; if his children be city Arabs
qualifying for the gallows, there is the ragged
school, if they can be weared into it before they can
effect a stampedo ; if he be frail under the solici-
tations of temptation there is policeman A, through
whom, for the first time, we make his acquaintance,
committing him for a month, harrying his nest,
rifling his home, stamping the whole family with
infamy, and making him for ever a broken man
a social Ishmaelite.

It is at least a sign that may warrant hopefulness,
that society begins to open its eyes to the magni-
tude of the evil to be redressed. One principle at
all events now commands general acknowledgment
—that prevention is better than cure—that the cure
but aggravates the evil—that the real way to
improve the world is not to frighten men from
getting worse but to train them up to be better—
not to hope to arrest iniquity by compulsion, but
rather to encourage virtue by persuasion, sympathy
and example ; and it will be worth while at greater
length to examine the method by which our social
reformers set about the business of impressing their
their " New Views of Society" upon the legislative
and executive functions of the country.