And now once more he looked with love upon his fellow–men, such love as the frigid atheist school shall never form nor educate—which truth alone to a great heart might be conclusive against that school—the love which few religions except our own inculcate, and no other takes for its essence. As yet he was too young to know the blind and inhuman selfishness, the formality and truckling, and the other paltry dishonesties, which still exist and try to cheat us under the name of “Society.” The cant is going by already. Every man who dares to think knows that its laws are obsolete, because they have not for their basis either of these three—truth, simplicity, charity. Even that young man was astonished at the manner in which society ignores its broader and only true meaning—fellowship among men—and renounces all other duties, save that of shaking from its shoes its fellow–dust. He could not look upon the scenes so nigh to him, and to each other, parted often by nothing more than nine inches of brick or two inches of deal; the wealth and the want, the feast and the famine, the satiety and the ravening, the euphemy and the blasphemy—though sometimes that last got inside the door, blew its nose, and was infidelity; the prudery and the indecency, the whispered lie and the yelled one, the sale of maidens by their mothers, or of women by themselves—though here again the difference was never very perceptible; all this impious contrast, spread as if for Godʼs approval, for the Universal Fatherʼs blessing, in the land most chiefly blessed by Him: which of His sons, not cast out for ever, could look on it without weeping? Cradock did something more than weep. He went with his little stock of money, though he knew it could not do much; and he tried to help in little ways, though as yet he had no experience. He bought meat, and clothes, and took things out of pawn, and tried to make peace where fights were. At first he was grossly insulted, as a meddlesome swell; but, when he had done two or three good things, and done them as a brother should, he began to be owned among them. In one thing he was right, although he had no experience; he confined his exertions to a very narrow compass. Of course he got imposed upon—of course he helped the unworthy; but after a while he began to know them, and even the unworthy—some two hundred per cent.—began to have faint ideas of trying to deserve good luck. One man who attempted to pick Cradʼs pocket was knocked down by the biggest thief there. “I wish I had a heap of money,” said Cradock, every day; “I must keep some for myself, I suppose. Perhaps, after all, I was wrong, in throwing up so hastily my chance of doing good.”