The pamphlet shows that delight in the bright side of life, and that sympathy with the pleasures of the poor, which won popularity for _The Pickwick Papers_ in 1836, and afterwards for _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and the _Christmas Carol_. The novels most like _Sunday as it Is_, however, are such protests against bigotry and cruelty as _Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and Barnaby Rudge_. Powerful pictures of the gloom of that British Sabbath which locked up everything "that could by any possibility afford relief to an overworked people," may be found in _Little Dorrit_; and the plot turns on the Sabbatarianism of a cruel fanatic who had made felony part of her religion. Much was done by this novel, as well as by _Pickwick_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_ towards the abolition of imprisonment for debt in 1869. His tone was very mild, compared with that of the popular orators. Resistance to bad laws was urged by Richard Carlile; and a clergyman named Taylor, who held the Gospel to be a solar myth, was imprisoned on October 24, 1827, for saying that the first martyrs for Jesus Christ were the Gadarene pigs. Another London lecturer declared on Sunday evening, December 2, 1832, that "The elective franchise should belong to women, as a part of the people," and again that "Women are qualified to elect and to be elected to all public offices." "Any argument for exclusion is of that kind which has justified every tyranny," says this discourse, which was printed for the first time, on May 11, 1833, in an American newspaper, _The Free Enquirer_. Its columns show that a young lady had already presented very advanced ideas as a lecturer at the Rotunda in London; but the general opinion of the sex was expressed by the wife of the Rev. John Sandford, whose popular book declared that "There is something unfeminine in independence. A really sensible woman... is conscious of inferiority." The Irish have supported themselves so successfully in America, and obeyed the laws so generally, as to prove that failure to do either in Ireland should not be attributed to their race or their religion, but wholly to their oppression. Memory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was all the more bitter in the nineteenth, because the destitution of the peasantry was increasing hopelessly. Removal of religious disabilities and reform of Parliament did not prevent bands of armed peasants from fighting against attempts to take away their cattle in payment of the tithes exacted by well-paid dignitaries of the hated Church. It sometimes happened that a dozen of the combatants were killed. Sydney Smith estimated that this way of keeping up a state church cost a million lives, from first to last, and Ireland had to be as heavily garrisoned as India, until a less vexatious system was established in 1838. Municipal government was wholly in the hands of little corporations, which had the sole power of electing new members and seldom admitted a Catholic. The ruling oligarchy was to the