_Mr. Forester._ If, in any form of human society, any one human being dies of hunger, while another wastes or consumes in the wantonness of vanity as much as would have preserved his existence, I hold that second man guilty of the death of the first. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Surely, Forester, you are not serious. _Mr. Forester._ Indeed I am. What would you think of a family of four persons, two of whom should not be contented with consuming their own share of diurnal provision but, having adventitiously the pre-eminence of physical power, should either throw the share of the two others into the fire, or stew it down into a condiment for their own? _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ I should think it very abominable, certainly. _Mr. Forester._ Yet what is human society but one great family? What is moral duty, but that precise line of conduct which tends to promote the greatest degree of general happiness? And is not this duty most flagrantly violated, when one man appropriates to himself the subsistence of twelve; while, perhaps in his immediate neighbourhood, eleven of his fellow-beings are dying with hunger? I have seen such a man walk with a demure face into church, as regularly as if the Sunday bell had been a portion of his corporeal mechanism, to hear a bloated and beneficed sensualist hold forth on the text of _Do as ye would be done by_, or _Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me_: whereas, if he had wished his theory to coincide with his practice he would have chosen for his text, _Behold a man gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners_:[62] and when the duty of words was over, the auditor and his ghostly adviser, issuing forth together, have committed poor Lazarus to the care of Providence, and proceeded to feast in the lordly mansion, like Dives that lived in purple.[63] _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Well, Forester, there I escape your shaft; for I have ‘forgotten what the inside of a church is made of,’ since they made me go to chapel twice a day at college. But go on, and don’t spare _me_.