Mr. Francis Peek has recently published a useful but saddening little book, whose title I have attached to this article. Not that it tells anything new to one who has studied deeply the pages of that terrible book of modern life, with its gilded leaves, but its unutterably dark contents; it only focuses the scattered knowledge into alarmingly clear vision. Indeed, in reading it, it is difficult to resist the old nightmare feeling, that after all this little planet may be the small rotary Vaudeville theater of the universe, where we poor actors in life’s scene are playing out a series of farces for the amusement of the angels, or more probably of darker and more distant visitants. The admirably logical social life that religiously shuts all the museums and picture-galleries on the Lord’s Day, and opens all the gin-shops; that is never tired of iterating that the proper sphere of woman is home, and brings up its 20,000 female orphans in large pauper barracks, from which the last touch of home-life has disappeared; that goes to meetings and loudly preaches thrift to the people, and then gruffly whispers in their ear by guardians of the poor, “Only be drunk and spendthrift enough, and we will house you and provide for your old age;” that goes to church and preaches that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and leaves the people to litter down like pigs at night—men and women, girls and boys, together in tenements where no rich man would think of stabling his horses; that goes to school and teaches its children the three R’s, and leaves them in dens of infamy to learn a fourth R, by every sight and sound of the day and night, ruin of body and soul; that virtuously declaims against the harlot, yet leaves its little girls to be brought up in brothels; that believes a fatal disorder is undermining the national health, and shuts the doors of its hospitals against it, and denies it the public means of cure; that legally protects the heiress up to twenty-one, and refuses to protect the poor man’s daughter, even at sixteen, from the trade of vice; that holds that the man is the responsible head of the woman, and throws the blame and disgrace on the woman—alas! alas! what a heap of anomalies is here—what real cause to complain of the methods of our moral life! No wonder that the poor Dissenting minister, much entangled in our social difficulties, and led on all sides to contradictory conclusions, threw in a deprecatory clause in his prayer, “Paradoxical as it may seem to thee, O Lord, it is nevertheless true.” And what are the results of such methods as these? What must be the results? That we read that in the wealthiest nation in the world, one in every thirty-one of our countrymen is a pauper; this, moreover, without including any of that vast number of destitute persons who are maintained in charitable institutions or by private benevolence.