England is its bane; we worship respectability, and thus contrive to
lose both the enjoyments of earth and the enjoyments of heaven. If
Great Britain could once learn to laugh like a child, she would be in
the way once more to pray like a saint.

"But this is not all: the sensuality and gross vice, and the hateful
moroseness and harshness of temper, which result from our
indisposition for gayety and enjoyment, are literally awful to think
of. Pride and licentiousness triumph in our land, because we are too
careworn or too stupid to enter heartily into innocent recreations.
Those two demons, one of which first cast man out of Paradise, while
the other has degraded him to the level of the brutes, are served by
myriads of helpless slaves, who are handed over to a bondage of
passion, through the gloominess that broods over our national
character. The young and the old alike, the poor and the wealthy, are
literally driven to excess, because there is nothing in our state of
society to refresh them after their toils, or to make life as much a
season of enjoyment as the inevitable lot of mortality will allow.

"Men fly to vice for the want of pure and innocent pleasures. The
gin-shops receive those who might be entertaining themselves with the
works of art in a public gallery. The whole animal portion of our
being is fostered at the expense of the spiritual. We become
brutalized, because we are morbidly afraid of being frivolous and of
wasting our time. The devil keeps possession of an Englishman's
heart, through the instrumentality of his carnal passions, because he
is too proud and too stupid to laugh and enjoy himself.

"Secret sin destroys its myriads, immolated on the altar of outward
respectability and of a regard for the opinion of a money-getting