_Barnaby Rudge_ called equally vivid attention to the laws which placed political disabilities upon Jews and Roman Catholics, rendering them incapable of voting and holding office throughout the British dominions, and sought to remove the hatred, prejudice, and dissensions which unnatural acts of Parliament always caused. In _A Tale of Two Cities_ the curse of caste is revealed; the inevitable results of giving special privileges to a so-called aristocratic class, and while its teachings were veiled as being connected with incidents in the French Revolution they were a wonderful help to the forwarding of true ideas of pure democracy and genuine recognition of the doctrine of the brotherhood of man. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ the theme is the horrors of the "Circumlocution Office"--that vast, hideous, monstrous juggernaut that rode rough-shod over all justice, truth, honor, right, decency, and sincerity, by its evasions, quibblings, dodgings, twinings, twistings, and deliberate perversions of the truth. Other writers made their novels the themes of similar crying abuses that needed reform. Henry Cockton wrote his _Valentine Vox the Ventriloquist_ to expose the hideous dealings of private mad-houses, where helpless men and women were confined by law, who were perfectly sane, yet who were in the way of dishonest lawyers, judges, administrators, heirs, or relations. I can never forget the powerful and terrible impression this story made upon me, though it is nearly forty years since I read it, especially where the author described what it is said he himself had had to pass through, when he was driven into temporary insanity by being strapped to his cot while fiends in human form mocked and taunted him and at the same time "tickled his feet" until he was a raging maniac.