Side by side with _victims_, might be placed the kindred species _downdraughts_, who are only different from the accident of their having friends who will rather be _weighed down_ by them to the very earth—to the grave itself—than permit them to sink by themselves. The downdraught is in reality a victim, and one of the darkest shade, being generally a person totally worthless in character, and abandoned in habits; but then he has not altogether cut the cables which bound him to his native grade in society—he has not all forgot himself to disgrace—he is still domesticated with his friends—he has a mother, or a wife, or a brother, or a sister, or perhaps an old aunt, who will try to keep him in food and clean linen, and, having lost all hope of his ever being actively good, will do anything for him, if he will only preserve a neutrality, and not be positively evil. He is a victim in appearance (always excepting the clean shirt), but he enjoys the happy superiority over that class, of having an open door to fly to when he pleases, and either a kind relation, who considers him “only a little wild in the meantime,” or else one who, for the sake of decent appearances, will endeavour to patch up all his peccadiloes, and even be tyrannised over by him, rather than shock society by an open rupture. The personal tendencies of a downdraught to victimization are strong as the currents of the great deep, but he is withheld from it by others. He has always some anchorage or other upon decent life, to keep him back from the gulf to which he would otherwise hurry on. In many cases, the very kindness and indulgence of friends was the original cause of his becoming a downdraught. He had every thing held to his head. He was encouraged in his pretences of headaches as an excuse for staying away from school. When afterwards an apprentice, he was permitted to break off, on the score of being compelled to put on fires and sweep out the shop. Or, perhaps, it was from none of those causes. Possibly, he was just one of those persons who seem to be totally destitute of all perception of the terms upon which men are permitted to exist in this world; that is, that they are either to be so fortunate as to have “their fathers born before them,” so that they may accede to wealth without exertion, or must else do something to induce their fellow-creatures to accord them the means of livelihood without beggary. That many persons are really born without this great leading faculty, is unfortunately but too indisputable; and, assuredly, they are as proper inmates for a lunatic asylum as more frantic madmen; for what is the use of reason, or even of talent, without the desire of exerting it, either in one’s own behalf, or in behalf of mankind? The terms of existence we allude to are expressed in the text of Scripture, “By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn thy bread;” so that the man must be considered a kind of heretic, as well as a fool, who will not,