It has ever been the crying sin of the vastly sympathetic to weep for the miseries of the distant, and blink at the wretchedness their eyes--if not their hearts--must ache to see. Their charity must have its proper stage, their sentiments the proper objects,--and their imaginations the undisturbed right to revel in the supposititious grievances of the far-off wretched and oppressed. The poor black man! the tortured slave! the benighted infidel! the debased image of his maker! the sunken bondsman! These terms must be the "Open sesame" for the breasts from whence spring bibles, bribes, blankets, glass beads, pocket-combs, tracts, teachers, missions, and missionaries. Oppression is what they would put down; but then the oppression must be of "foreign manufacture." Your English, genuine home-made article, though as superior in strength and endurance as our own canvas is to the finest fold of gauze-like cambric, is in their opinion a thing not worth a thought. A half oppressed Caffre is an object of ten thousand times more sympathy than a wholly oppressed Englishman; a half-starved Pole the more fitting recipient of the same proportion of actual bounty to a wholly starving peasant of our own land of law and liberty. Let one-tenth the disgusting details so nobly exposed in the _Times_ newspaper, as to the frightful state of some of our legalised poor law inquisitions, appear as extracts from the columns of a _foreign_ journal, stating such treatment to exist amongst a foreign population, and mark the result. Why, the town would teem with meetings and the papers with speeches. Royal, noble, and honourable chairmen and vice chairmen would launch out their just anathemas against the heartless despots whose realms were disgraced by such atrocities. Think, think of the aged poor torn from their kindred, caged in a prison, refused all aid within, debarred from every hope without,--think of the flesh, the very flesh, rotting by slow degrees, and then in putrid masses falling from their wretched bones: think, we say, on this--then give what name you can, save murder, to their quickly succeeding death. Fancy children--children that should be in their prime--so caged and fed that the result is disease in its most loathsome form, and with all its most appalling consequences! No hope! no flight! The yet untainted, as it were, chained to the spot, with mute despair watching the slow infection, and with breaking hearts awaiting the hour--the moment--when it _must_ reach to them! We say, think of these things--not as if they were the doings in England, and therefore legalised matters of course--but think of them as the arts of some despot in a far-off colony, and oh, how all hearts would burn--all tongues curse and call for vengeance on the abetors of such atrocities!