"Vagrant Lackalls! foolish most of you, criminal many of you, miserable all; the sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. What to do with you I know not; long have I been meditating, and it is hard to tell. Here are some three millions of you, as I count; so many of you fallen sheer over into the abysses of open Beggary; and, fearful to think, every new unit that falls is _loading_ so much more the chain that drags the other over. On the edge of the precipice hang uncounted millions; increasing, I am told, at the rate of 1200 a-day. They hang there on the giddy edge, poor souls, crumping themselves down, holding on with all their strength, but falling, falling one after another; and the chain is getting _heavy_, so that ever more fall; and who at last will stand! What to do with you? The question, what to do with you? especially since the potato died, is like to break my heart! "One thing, after much meditating, I have at last discovered, and now know for some time back: That you cannot be left to roam abroad in this unguided manner, stumbling over the precipices, and loading ever heavier the fatal _chain_ upon those who might be able to stand; that this of locking you up in temporary Idle Workhouses, when you stumble, and subsisting you on Indian meal, till you can sally forth again on fresh roamings, and fresh stumblings, and ultimate descent to the devil;--that this is _not_ the plan; and that it never was, or could out of England have been supposed to be, much as I have prided myself upon it! "Vagrant Lackalls! I at last perceive, all this that has been sung and spoken, for a long while, about enfranchisement, emancipation, freedom, suffrage, civil and religious liberty over the world, is little other than sad temporary jargon, brought upon us by a stern necessity,--but now ordered by a sterner to take itself away again a little. Sad temporary jargon, I say; made up of sense and nonsense,--sense in small quantities, and nonsense in very large;--and, if taken for the whole or permanent truth of human things, it is no better than fatal infinite nonsense eternally _untrue_. All men, I think, will soon have to quit this, to consider this as a thing pretty well achieved; and to look out towards another thing much more needing achievement at the time that now is."