Sir Edwin is a palace-car passenger on the great world- train, and knows little of the perils of the track. His coach rolls smooth, he takes his ease and indulges in optimistic moralizing, while those who serve him look death in the face so frequently that they learn to mock him,--to take desperate chances that may plunge them down to destruction and drag all else after. It has been my lot to look at life from the cab-windows, from the point of view of the man with the grimy hand and the soiled jacket. While Sir Edwin has been contemplating with dreamy interest the faraway purple hills, I have been compelled to scrutinize less giant objects closer at hand; hence it is not strange that my opinion of the world should differ somewhat from that entertained by the speculative author of "The Light of Asia." In brief Sir Edwin knows all about the beauty, wealth and success which make earth a Paradise for the few; I something of that hideousness, poverty and despair that make it a Purgatory for the many. That world to which Sir Edwin belongs, and which he contemplates so approvingly, is but the gold-leaf on the graven image, the bright foam on the bosom of a bottomless sea, a verdant crust cast over a chaos of fierce despair,--which will some day rip it into a million ribbons, enact an all-embracing French Revolution that will sweep our boasted "Car of Progress" back a thousand years on the crimson crest of a wave of blood and fire! If Sir Edwin had explored the infernal vortex beneath his feet he would not talk so complacently of the "trend of human events." For the benefit of Sir Edwin and many other wealthy and cultured palace-car passengers who amuse themselves with theories; who infer that because human slavery is abolished in the Occident and the thrones of the Orient are beginning to totter before the might of democracy; because science is marching on to triumph after triumph, and no Spanish Inquisition or English Court of High Commission longer casts its upas-shadow athwart the hearts of men, the great world is "growing nobler and better," I hereby tender my services to pilot them through that Perdition which does not hover indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology, but hath a well-defined latitude and longitude; is visual, tactual,--in which untold millions of mankind writhe and shriek from the cradle to the grave! . . .