The progress of men who live by their daily industry, through this world, may be likened, in some respects, to the march of an army through an enemy’s country. He who, from fatigue, from disease, from inebriety, from severe wounds, or whatever cause, falls out of the line of march, and lays him down by the wayside, is sure, as a matter of course, to be destroyed by the peasantry; once let the column he belongs to pass on a little way ahead, and death is his sure portion. It is a dreadful thing to fall behind the onward march of the world. VICTIMS—the word placed at the head of this article—is a designation for those woe-begone mortals who have had the misfortune to drop out of the ranks of society. Every body must know more or less of _victims_, for every body must have had to pay a smaller or greater number of half-crowns in his time to keep them from starvation. It happens, however, that the present writer has had _a great deal to do with victims_; and he therefore conceives himself qualified to afford his neighbours a little information upon the subject. It is a subject not without its moral. A _victim_ may become so from many causes. Some men are wrong placed in the world by their friends, and ruin themselves. Some are ill married, and lose heart. Others have tastes unsuited to the dull course of a man of business, as for music, social pleasures, the company of men _out of their own order_, and so forth. Other men have natural imperfections of character, and sink down, from pure inability to compete with rivals of more athletic constitution. But the grand cause of declension in life is inability to accommodate circumstances and conduct.