manity! Well may even the careless say-Cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils. While others bow before the shrine of riches, rank, and fortune, O let the heart which truly loves mankind seek out the despised inmates of the workhouse, the gaol, and the brothel, where his brotherly love and reverence can do so much for the elevation of his fellow-creatures! Let him prostrate himself before the eclipsed majesty of these ill-fated sons and daughters of man, and register an inward vow never to join in the general contempt, nor to desert them, till they have been raised from their present abject condition, and till there is no member of human society in the awful position of an outcast from its bosom.

Now, my Christian readers of all hues and complexions, do not soliloquise, or say tauntingly or ironically, ferociously or biliously-"I do not like this Cassius: he thinks too much-he pierces below the sub-stratum-he outHerods Herod; he is a Radical, socialist, rationalist, heterodox, unsound, &c. &c. He doesn't sleep o' night,' -Such men are dangerous.'" We plead guilty to all these indictments but the two last: let our judges, timeservers, and hypercritics, withhold their verdict until we evoke the following explication. Undeniably, we are radicals and socialists in the plain, literal, and bona fide meaning of the words, tossing aside nicknames and all vulgarity; yet we have not a fraction of either in the obnoxious or deleterious meaning, as used in common parlance. That atrocious and latitudinarian liberty that degenerates into licentiousness, we ignore and protest against, as much as we do against the silly fears of those

who imagine, if our benevolent views were carried out in all their beauty-"Othello's occupation would be gone.' Nothing so dangerous, however, as "custom's fraud, and fraud's custom!" Verbum sat.

Fraser has some terse and pointed remarks upon the virtue of patriotism. "We are only," says the talented editor, "beginning to gather up the true features of this virtue. Time was, when we fancied it to be a bluster about war. There came another time, in which it seemed to be a struggle against narrow laws. At present, it is public-spiritedness;-a term which hides beneath its vagueness a world of lies! Had we looked deeply into the lives of those great men who have done true service for their country, we might have erred less and learned more. We should have learned for one thing, that the beginnings of all patriotism is in the heart and home, and that the public-spiritedness which is not rooted there is spurious and rotten to the core. For in the inner life of our greatest men, there was ever first a struggle for truth and freedom to their own souls, before they ventured into public service. These men understood, that the sacrament of admission into the Church of the Patriots, is the spirit of self-denial. And, therefore, you always find that they were great in the inner courts of their being, having subdued their own wills to GoD, and established His law in their homes. We have much talk of social freedom in our day; and we are not without earnest, well-directed aimings towards it. But we lack one thing much. We could do with less talk; but we must have more personal preparation. Our public men do not wrestle enough in private

for inward freedom. There is too little of the secret battle against tyranny in their midst. They are too easily content with seeking freedom and reform for the far-away and the external: they want the wisdom and the self-denial to begin at home."

CHAPTER XII.

66

CRITIQUE ON THE LIFE OF BARNUM."-MANDEVILLE'S
OF THE BEES."-IS HONESTY THE BEST POLICY?

"It often falls (as here it erst befell)

That mortal foes do turne to faithfull friends,

And friends profest are chaunged to foemen fell;

The cause of both, their minds depends,

And th' end of both likewise of both their ends;

For enmitie, that of no ill proceeds

But of occasion, with the occasion ends;

FABLE

And friendship, which a faint affection breeds,
Without regard of good, dyes like ill-grounded seeds."
-SPENSER'S Faerie Queen, canto iv.

WE are old-fashioned enough to believe, and to put our
whole confidence in, the time-honoured maxim-"Honesty
is the best policy;" and, therefore, when we meet with a
book like this, which is intended to relate the success of
of charlatanry and falsehood, we cannot sufficiently express
our disgust of the impudence of the man who has written
it. The author, Mr. Barnum, with the most unblushing
effrontery, confesses that he commenced life with the
determination to swindle the public. The line that he
adopted for this end, certainly kept him without the limits
of the law, inasmuch as he drew money from the pockets
of the public, by trading upon their credulity, rather than
by actually stopping them on the highway, and demand-
ing,
"Your money, or your life." We are, however, un-
able to discover any great moral distinction between the

two modes of getting money. Each process is dishonest and disreputable. We had no doubt when Mr. Barnum was parading the little abortion, C. S. Stratton, a child five years of age, as a dwarf of eleven years old, that the public were being greatly humbugged; but it was well for Mr. B. that he was not quite so confidential when taking in the host of sight-seers at the Egyptian Hall, and elsewhere, as he has been in the narrative of his life and adventures. Most assuredly, he would then either have had his ear nailed to the pump, or have been introduced to the mysteries of English horse-ponding. Nevertheless we cannot attach all the blame to him. So long as the public derive gratification from being deceived, and follow a fashion of which the aristocracy, to their discredit, are too often the leaders, they richly deserve to be taken in. It will be quite clear from these remarks, that we hold both the author and his book in deserved contempt, which is extended even to disgust when we find him, in the midst of his delusive practices, and glorying that he is making money by them, intimating that he never travelled without a Bible and daily reading it. Mr. B. may have imagined. this habit to be a salve to his conscience; but we would remind him, that it is not enough to follow an observance, without striving to act upon the directions that such observance ought to inculcate. The touches of pretended religious sentiment, which are introduced throughout this volume with no sparing hand, are a tissue of despicable cant, which we are inclined to believe is not one bit more worthy of credit, than is any other pretence of honesty which is occasionally introduced as a kind of set-off to the