The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 381: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

346 THE COURT OF LONDON they taunt the victims of vice with their profligacy; but they do nothing, absolutely nothing, to establish a remedy. It is monstrous and absurd to take an aristocrat and make bim a minister. He naturally labours only to aggrandize the order to which he belongs, and he utterly neglects the people. Thus the millions are inevitably sacrificed to a wealthy, despotic, and luxurious oligarchy. Let a minister be taken from the people, — a man who knows what the people are, who has made himself acquainted with all the miseries of the poorer classes, and who under- stands the springs and causes of that demoralization which fills the low boozing-kens with revellers, and furnishes so many victims to the scaffold, the penal settlement, the hulks, and the gaol, ay, and so many prostitutes to the streets. Such a man would be well aware how to grapple with the evil. He knows that poverty, and nothing but poverty, is the origin of the tremendous mischief which exists as a shame and a scandal in that country so falsely called Free and Civilized England. And what causes this poverty, this penury, this destitu- tion which renders intolerable the lives of millions in a country naturally possessing, in the resources of its soil and the enterprise of its sons, every element of a consum- mate prosperity? It is the fact that all the wealth is held in the possession of a few; it is the abhorrent anomaly that where one has plenty, a thousand are starving; where one counts his money by hundreds of pounds, a million count theirs by pence! The iniquitous laws of primogeniture and entail, the absence of any statute to regulate the ac- cumulation of capital, the awful monopoly which capital so accumulated constitutes, and the tremendous tyranny which it engenders, — these are the springs of that pauperism which sits like an incubus upon the bosom of fair Britannia. Oh, deplorable, heartrending, and shocking is it to con- template the misery in which the toiling, industrious millions of these islands exist! ‘‘ Death from starvation ’’ — this is @ common verdict returned by coroners’ juries in this country. Will ye believe it, O glorious people of France? Will ye believe it, O enviable people of the United States of America? Our sickly sentimentalists and maudlin saints raise their eyes and lift up their hands with horror when they talk COMMICMOOOKS. (EC)