Talk not to us of christianizing Barbarians in the remote islands of the South Seas, when the children of so many of our own fellow-countrymen and country-women are but barbarous Christians at home! Let the reader who imagines that we exaggerate the amount of the evil we denounce,—let him take his stand, any evening, in the midst of Seven Dials, and well consider the scenes around him. It is said that there are Seven Cardinal Sins: at the point where we would wish our sceptical reader to post himself, he may command a view of seven streets, each one presenting to his contemplation some new phase in the common sphere of hideous poverty and terrible demoralisation. Mark the population of that neighbourhood, consisting of seven principal streets, with all their connecting lanes and alleys—with their dark, filthy courts, and their murderous-looking nooks and passages! Of what does this population consist? Men brutalised by drink, or rendered desperate by poverty, and in either state ready to commit a crime,—women of squalid, wasted, and miserable appearance, who, being beaten by their husbands and fathers, revenge themselves upon their children or their little brothers and sisters,—poor shopkeepers who endeavour to make up for the penury of their petty dealings by cheating their famished customers,—wretched boys and girls whose growth is stunted by suffering, whose forms are attenuated through want, and whose minds are poisoned by the scenes of vice, dissipation, and immorality which open upon them at their very birth! What hope—what promise for the future do such beings as these hold out? In consternation and sorrow, mingled with the most awful misgivings, do we survey the picture which we are now compelled to draw;—and our feelings are thus painful because we know this picture to be correct! And yet we call our country "MERRY ENGLAND!"