_Mr. Forester._ Alas, my friend! I would willingly see such virtues as do honour to human nature, without being very solicitous as to the comparative quantities of impulse and reflection in which they originate. If the security of property and the diffusion of general knowledge were attended with a corresponding increase of benevolence and _individual mental power_, no philanthropist could look with despondency on the prospects of the world: but I can discover no symptoms of either the one or the other. Insatiable accumulators, overgrown capitalists, fatteners on public spoil, I cannot but consider as excrescences on the body politic, typical of disease and prophetic of decay: yet it is to these and such as these that the poet tunes his harp, and the man of science consecrates his labours: it is for them that an enormous portion of the population is condemned to unhealthy manufactories, not less deadly but more lingering than the pestilence: it is for them that the world rings with lamentations, if the most trivial accident, the most transient sickness, the most frivolous disappointment befall them: but when the prisons swarm, when the workhouses overflow, when whole parishes declare themselves bankrupt, when thousands perish by famine in the wintry streets, where then is the poet, where is the man of science, where is the _elegant_ philosopher? The poet is singing hymns to the great ones of the world, the man of science is making discoveries for the adornment of their dwellings or the enhancement of their culinary luxuries, and the _elegant_ philosopher is much too refined a personage to allow such vulgar subjects as the sufferings of the poor to interfere with his sublime speculations. _They are married and cannot come!_ _Mr. Fax._ Ἐψαυσας ἀλγεινοτατας ἐμοι μεριμνας![130] Those _elegant_ philosophers are among the most fatal enemies to the advancement of moral and political knowledge; laborious triflers, profound investigators of nothing, everlasting talkers about taste and beauty, who see in the starving beggar only the picturesqueness of his rags, and in the ruined cottage only the harmonising tints of moss, mildew, and stonecrop. _Mr. Forester._ We talk of public feeling and national sympathy. Our dictionaries may define those words and our lips may echo them, but we must look for the realities among less enlightened nations. The Canadian savages cannot imagine the possibility of any individual in a community having a full meal while another has but half an one:[131] still less could they imagine that one should have too much, while another had nothing. Theirs is that bond of brotherhood which nature weaves and civilisation breaks, and from which the older nations grow the farther they recede.