"We see on every hand stately palaces, to which no country in the world offers any parallel. The houses of our rich are more gorgeous and more luxurious than those of any other land. Every clime is ransacked to adorn or furnish them. The soft carpets, the heavy rich curtains, the luxuriously easy couches, the beds of down, the services of plate, the numerous servants, the splendid equipages, and all the expensive objects of literature, science, and the arts, which crowd the palaces of England, form but items in an _ensemble_ of refinement and magnificence, which was never imagined or approached, in all the splendor of the ancient empires. "But look beneath all this display and luxury, and what do we see there? A pauperized and suffering people. "To maintain a show, we have degraded the masses, until we have created an evil so vast, that we now despair of ever finding a remedy."[23] We may now dismiss Mr. Kay--this testimony is sufficiently direct and sufficiently ample: and yet it would have been easy to have introduced many more and stronger statements made by him, which have been omitted because they were loo long to be quoted. Mr. Kay is neither Chartist nor Socialist. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Barrister-at-law, and has traveled over Europe for eight years, under an appointment from the Senate of the University of Cambridge, as Traveling Bachelor of the University, commissioned "to travel through Western Europe in order to examine the social condition of the poorer classes of the different countries."[24] The evidence of such a man should be authoritative, but we will continue our quotations: "It is undeniable that morality has declined in our days with the progress of knowledge."[25] "One word more, and we have done. On many questions of practical duty, men are now affecting to be wiser and better than the Bible. Plans of social progress and improvement are rife, that have an air of transcendental refinement about them, unknown to the homely morality of the Word of God. We are becoming too sentimental to endure that even the murderer shall be put to death. And now we are for bettering God's ordinance of marriage itself; and we see a fine, romantic, tender charm in an alliance of brothers and sisters, on which God has stamped his curse. What may such things betoken? Are they ominous of such unbridled lawlessness and lust as marked the days before the Flood? Are they signs of the days not unlike these that are to precede the coming of the Son of Man?"[26] "The task of restoring health and soundness to a society so fearfully diseased as ours unquestionably is, is on all hands acknowledged to be at once the noblest and the most imperative to which citizens or statesmen can now direct their energies."[27]