Think of the growing spirit of freedom and true democracy, of brotherhood and comradeship that are welding the world together in the bonds of humanitarian brotherhood; treaties between nations, federations of nations, world's fairs, the Red Cross movement, The Hague Peace Tribunal, arbitration instead of war, and agitation for the reduction of armies and navies.[D]
One has but to study the changes that have taken place in our civilization since Dickens began to write, for instance, to see how wonderfully the world has progressed. He wrote Nicholas Nickleby to call attention to the horrible abuses existent in boys' boarding schools, where boys, who for any reason were desired out of the way at home, were put in charge of human fiends in the guise of "schoolmasters." Step-children, heirs who were in the way, natural children, and those whose parents had no natural affection for them, were put into these dens, and so cruelly abused that they often died; and at the best they dragged out their miserable existence afraid of what each hour of the day might bring forth and finding only in their troubled sleep the relief from the active cruelties they were made to bear.
Little Dorrit graphically pictured the horrors of the "prison for debt" system, and in the wonderfully painted character of Little Dorrit's father, Dickens showed how every human trait and feeling, every noble passion and emotion was dwarfed, twisted, distorted, and perverted by the action of this unnatural, cruel, and monstrous law.
Barnaby Rudge called equally vivid attention to the laws which placed political disabilities upon Jews and Roman Catholics, rendering them incapable of voting and holding office throughout the British dominions, and sought to remove the hatred, prejudice, and dissensions which unnatural acts of Parliament always caused.
In A Tale of Two Cities the curse of caste is revealed; the inevitable results of giving special privileges to a so-called aristocratic class, and while its teachings were veiled as being connected with incidents in the French Revolution they were a wonderful help to the forwarding of true ideas of pure democracy and genuine recognition of the doctrine of the brotherhood of man.
In Martin Chuzzlewit the theme is the horrors of the "Circumlocution Office"—that vast, hideous, monstrous juggernaut that rode rough-shod over all justice, truth, honor, right, decency, and sincerity, by its evasions, quibblings, dodgings, twinings, twistings, and deliberate perversions of the truth.
Other writers made their novels the themes of similar crying abuses that needed reform. Henry Cockton wrote his Valentine Vox the Ventriloquist to expose the hideous dealings of private mad-houses, where helpless men and women were confined by law, who were perfectly sane, yet who were in the way of dishonest lawyers, judges, administrators, heirs, or relations. I can never forget the powerful and terrible impression this story made upon me, though it is nearly forty years since I read it, especially where the author described what it is said he himself had had to pass through, when he was driven into temporary insanity by being strapped to his cot while fiends in human form mocked and taunted him and at the same time "tickled his feet" until he was a raging maniac.
To the people of to-day the term "Chartist" means nothing. Nine-tenths of the population of the United States possibly never heard the term. Yet it is only a few generations since men were sentenced to "Botany Bay" and other penal settlements for twenty, thirty, and more years, and sometimes "for life," for joining in this reform which demanded certain rights that we have enjoyed without a thought ever since we were born. One of these grand old warriors for man's greater freedom used to visit at my father's house when I was a lad. He was an intellectual giant who had won the honor and fame the world freely accords to those who do not take it by the throat too severely, and once in a while he could be induced to tell of the days of his earlier conflict;—how that he and his compeers fought for a repeal of the corn laws—laws which made it almost impossible for a poor man to get bread—and for the right of a man to sell the products of his own labor from door to door to save himself from starvation. He was imprisoned and sentenced for a long term of years and while in prison wrote a poem of tremendous power and influence. How my heart burned to the old warrior, and I then and there declared that