highwayman's demand of "your money OR your life," into that of "your
money AND your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives
of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and
rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a
life extra per week to its landlords; {11} and then debate, with
drivelling tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not
piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers.
Also, a great nation having made up its mind that hanging is quite
the wholesomest process for its homicides in general, can yet with
mercy distinguish between the degrees of guilt in homicides; and
does not yelp like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-
track of an unhappy crazed boy, or grey-haired clodpate Othello,
"perplexed i' the extreme," at the very moment that it is sending a
Minister of the Crown to make polite speeches to a man who is
bayoneting young girls in their fathers' sight, and killing noble
youths in cool blood, faster than a country butcher kills lambs in
spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven and its
Powers, by pretending belief in a revelation which asserts the love
of money to be the root of ALL evil, and declaring, at the same
time, that it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all chief
national deeds and measures, by no other love. {12}

My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading.
We want some sharper discipline than that of reading; but, at all
events, be assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for a
people with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer
is intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for
the English public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful
writing,--so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of
avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than this