Note Return to text — REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES.

Criminal ostentation stands ever in the way of man’s progress to a higher condition, like a wasting disease that comes in to arrest the recovery of a patient. All schemes of benevolence, all efforts to gain a greater mastery of nature’s forces, and thus emancipate the race from poverty and pestilence, languish feebly, or totally fail, for want of the resources consumed in the blaze of ostentation. The resources of a Church that might abolish ignorance and pauperism must be given to uphold the royal state of lord bishops, who sit in parliament, and make a heavy incubus on all real progress, obstructing the measures which might uplift into comfort, decency, and intelligence, England’s three millions of submerged classes who live in destitution and misery.12