The Sun.
London, England, 1845-05-16 00:00:00

MR. DISRAELI'S S YBIL.

The following are some further extracts from
Mr. D'lsraeli's interesting new work :

THE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE.
" Sybil, whose mind had been nurtured with great
thoughts, and with whom success or failure alike par-
took of th• heroic, who had hoped for triumph, but who
was prepared for sacrifice, found to her surprise that
great thoughts have very little to do with the business
of the world ; that human affairs, even in an age of
revolution, are the subjeet of compromise ; and that the
essence of compromise is littleness. She thought that
the People, calm and collected, conscious at last of their
strength and confident in their holy cause, had but to
express their pure and noble convictions by the dele-
gates of their choice, and that an antique and decrepid
authority must bow before the irresistible influence of
their moral power. These delegates of their choice
turned out to be a plebeian senate of wild ambitions and
sinister and selfish ends, while the decrepid authority
that she had been taught existed only by the sufferance
of the millions was compact and organized, with every
element of physical power at its command, and supported
by the interests, the sympathies, the honest convictions,
and the strong prejudices of classes influential not
merely from their wealth but even by their numbers.
" Nor could she resist the belief that the feeling of
the rich towards the poor was not that sentiment of un-
mingled hate and scorn which she associated with Nor-
man conquerors and feudal laws. She would ascribe
rather the want of sympathy that unquestionably exists
between wealth and work in England, to mutual igno-
rance between the classes which possess these two great
elements of national prosperity ; and though the source
of that ignorance was to be sought in antecedent
circumstances of ♦iolence and oppression, the conse-
quences perhaps had outlived the causes, as customs
survife opinions.
" Sybil looked towards Westminster, to those proud
and passionate halls where assembles the Parliament of
England ; that rapacious, violent, and haughty body,
that had brought kings and prelates to the block ; spoiled
churches and then seized the sacred manors for their
personal prey ; invested their own possessions with in-
finite privileges, and then mortgagedifor their state and
empire the labour of countless generations. Could the
voice of solace sound from such a quarter ?"

TIIE NEW GENERATION.
" Egremont shook his head. • You still will cherish
these phantoms, dear Sybil ! and why ? They are not
♦isions of delight. Believe me they are as vain as they
are distressing. The mind of England is the mind ever
of the rising race. Trust me it is with the People. And
not the less so, because this feeling is one of which even
in a great degree it is unconscious. Those opinions
which you have been educated to dread and mistrust are
opinions that are dying away. Predominant opinions
are gcnerally the opinions of the generation that is
vanishing Let an accident, which speculation could
not foresee, the balanced state at this moment of par-
iamentary parties cease, and in a few years, more or
less, cease it must, and you will witness a development of
the new mind of England, which will make up by its
tapid progress fur its retarded action. I live among
Nese men ; I know their inmost souls ; I watch their
instincts and their impulses ; I know the principles
which they have imbibed, and I know, however hindered
by circumstances for the moment, those principles must
bear their fruit. It will be a produce hostile to the oli-
garchical system. The future ➢rinciple of English
politics will not be a levelling principle ; not a principle
adverse to privileges, but favourable to their extension.
It will seek to ensure equality, not by levelling the Few
but by elevating the Many.'

THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION.
" There is more serfdom in England now than at
any time since the Conquest. I speak of what passes
under my daily eyes when I say, that those who labour
can as little choose or change their masters now as
when they were born thralls. There are great bodies
of the working classes of this country nearer the con-
dition of brutes, than they have been at any time since
the Conquest. Indeed I see nothing to distinguish then
from brutes, except that their morals are inferior. In-
cest and infanticide are as common among them as
among the lower animals. The domestic principle
waxes weaker and weaker every year in England ; nor
can we wonder at it, when there is no comfort to cheer
and no sentiment to hallow the Home,'
" I was reading a work the other day,' said Egre-
mont, that statistically proved that the general con-
dition of the people was much better at this moment than
it had been at any known period of history.'
" Ah l yes, I know that style of speculation,' said
Gerard ; your gentleman who reminds you that a
working man now has a pair of cotton stockinge, and
that Harry the Eighth himself was not as well eff. At
any rate, the condition of classes must be judged of by
the age, and by their relation with each other. One
need not dwell OR that. I deny the premises. I deny
that the condition of the main body is better now than
at any other period of our history; that it is as good as it
has been at several. I say, for instance, the people were
better clothed, better lodged, and better fed just before
the war of the Roses than they are at this moment.
We know how an English peasant lived in those times :
he eat flesh every day, he never drank water, was well
housed, and clothed in stout woollens. Nor are the
Chronicles necessary to tell us this. The acts of Par-
liament from the Plantagenets to the Tudors teach us
alike the price of provisions and the rate of wages ; and
we see in a moment that the wages of those days brought
as much sustenance and comfort as &reasonable man could
desire.' "

TEE NAMELESS ONE.
" • I see one of your partners coming in,' said Mick,
making many signals to a person who very aeon joined
them. Well, Devilsdust, how are you?' This was the
familiar appellation of a young gentleman, yds° really
had no other, baptismal or patrimonial. About a fort-
night after his mother had introduced him into the
world, she returned to her factory and put her infant
out to nurse, that is to say, paid threepence a week to an
old woman who takes charge of these new-born babes
for the day, and gives them back at night to their
mothers as they hurriedly return from the scene of
their labour to the dungeon or the den, which is stilt by
courtesy called ' home.' The expense is not great :
laudanum and treacle, administered in the shape of
some popular elixir, affords these innocents a brief taste
of the sweets of existence, and keeping them quiet, pre-
pares them for the silence of their impending grave.
Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in
England, as it is on the banks of the Ganges; a circum-
stance which apparently has not yet engaged the atten-
tion of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts. But the vital principle is an impulse
from an immortal artist, and sometimes baffles, even in
its tenderest phases, the machinations of society for its
extinction. There are infants that will defy even star-
vation and poison, unnatural mothers and demon
nurses. Such was le nameless one of whom we speak.
We castnot say he thrived; but he would not die. So at
two years of age, his mother being lost sight of, and the
weekly payment having ceased, he was sent out in the
street to play,' in order to be ruu over. Even this ex-
pedient failed. The youngest and the feeblest of the
band of victims, Juggernaut spared him to Moloch.
All his companions were disposed of. Three months'
' play' in the streets god rid of this tender company—
shoeless, half-nakcd, and uncombed—whose age varied
from two to five years. Some were crushed, some were
lost, some caught cold and fevers, crept back to their
garret or their cellars, were dosed with Godfrey's
cordial, and died in peace. The nameless one would not
disappear. He always got out of the way of the carts
and horses, and never lost his own. They gave him no
food: he foraged for himself, and shared with the dogs
d
the garbage of the streets. But still he lived ; stusntL
and pale, he defied even the fatal fever whioha
only habitant of his cellar that never quitted it. And
slumbering at night on a bed ofmouldering straw, his
only protection against the pi Y ash surface of his den,
with a dungheap at his head and a cesspool at his feet, he
still clung to the only roof which shielded him from the
tempest.'