The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1851-11-25 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

THE HOUSE BUILT UPON THE SAND-Is usually situate in the darkest, dirtiest, dismallest part of the town beyond the beat of the highway rate, poor rate, paving and lighting rate, sewer rate, or any other rate except the curseand-quarrel rate, with which the wretched tenants are for ever rating each other. The only thing that bears a hint of any value is the land, every square inch of which is bricked over and vaulted under, close and fasted as a city cemetery, as if the earth had not another acre to spare, and man must be content to occupy as little surface as passible, to leave more to grow food to feed him. Human beings are stalled in these crammed and crowded bins, the only difference between them and the cattle, being the better victualling of the latter. The rain that like a heavenly unction pours fertillity upon other quarters, on this spot only multiplies mud. and peninsulates every house and entry with a moat of puddle, exhaling with industrious hostility the retributive penalties of sanatory neglect, in a continuous malaria generating every type of rheumatic, typhus and ntli.7r malignant fevers. The high wind, that like the rough fidelity of en old friend, disturbs but purifies the stagnant atmosphere of every other spot, here serves but to aggravate the local fcetors, by the larger circulation of their nuisance, accumulating the dilapidations in stock by the tottering down of more ruined chim flies, and the forcible ejectment of lditional slates and pantiles. The very frosts that, like a sharp humoured sarcasm, provoke the interchange of mutual hospitalities among their happier fellow-citizens, seems here to freeze more bitterly than elsewhere, and seal up every cracked door and broken casement, with a stuffing of rags hardly spared from their shivering wearer's limbs, waving in the wind as intelligible signals of distress, or stiffening in the cold, as in predictive imitation of their owner's fate, whom vice, and its matricidal offspring penury, had socially worn to tatters like them. It is among these grim neighbours you are to search for "the House built upon the Sand," and if yon dare venture at nightfall under a roof, whose ill-chosen foundations may bring down its ruins upon you,—on that ba. ren social sand of as improvident drunkard's heart, which grows nothing green—that dry sand whose insatiable thirst every tide leaves dry and thirsty still— that dull sand that only retains any impression made upon it 'till the next fl ,nd of inundating drink obliterates it—that treacherous sand that has engulphed many a pretty little craft that mistook it for an anchorage—that suicidal sand that must be worthless so long as it lies on the brink of those depths that drown it every day—that wretched sand, that is itself a heap of wrecks and fragments, lashed by the waves of intemperate fury from its native rocks, and spewed out, as if the sea of life were sick of it, upon a shore of weeds and dreary waste—on such a sand, the improvident man builds the horse that is to be his home, and the home of the wretched squaw, his wife, and of his children. _ _  ..... There he is to rear the disastrous duplicates who are to repeat himself to the contamination and misery of another generation. On his model, a characteristic progeny is to be formed, destined like devil's Nazarites from the womb, to be the plague and pest; the corrupted and corrupters of their future human kind— at once a hurthen and a bane to their contemporaries, like himself, he and they shall be the crypto-gamia—the fungi of society, vegetating at its gateposts, rotting its timbers, betraying its unsoundness, and accelerating its decay. Degenerate, deleterious, abandoned, the wretched character sees no hope of relief hut in its own destruction, no refuge but in • scape from itself. The devilish charm of drink holds him spell-hound within a fatal circle, drawn with alternate cups and rags, and he cannot break from its toils—drink is the Delilah that has shorn hint of his strength—he cannot "go out and shake himself as at other times, for the Lord bath departed from him." Poor dramstruck wretch—he's cup-crazed—drink has" put out his eyes"— like the blind Samson in the mill, he grinds in the malt-house, and Philistine lords and loggerheads make game of his prostituted strength—but, my lords, I would have you beware how you trifle with such aiant.besotments too long—it's dangerous sport—like the old judge, he may pull a house down about your ears, as well as his own ! You have suffered this Samson vice to grind on in the moral blindness of its victims, take heed lest it realise on your hands a civil Frankenstein whose monstrous hypostasis shall dog the footsteps of its social progenitor, affiliating on the homicide neglect which quickened it, a punitive reaction in the cost, misery, and shame, of its hideous subsistence. . . -  yencer. DESTRUCTIVE Firtz—A