“It is the man who cannot leave home, that cries out for war; it is the man who has no chance of bleeding, that calls for blood. A paper on the breakfast-table, which brings a return of thousands slain, is, to the appetite of those sickly sophists, an agreeable stimulant. ‘Humanity’ makes a capital banner for a cavilist, ignorant of the matter of the subject he condemns, to march under; and ‘no cruelty’ is a cry like the ‘no popery’ cry, which gathers together hosts of unthinking people ready to arraign and pull down they know not what.
“The shrivelled penman, whether clerk or layman, whose thews and sinews have wasted through inactivity, sits at his desk and condemns recreations, pastimes, and pleasures, the value of which he has never known, and the loss of which, in consequence, is immaterial to him; while hosts of others, conscious of their own more secret mental deformities, are zealous to hang charges of immorality on any superficially available corner of the characters of their neighbours, for the sole purpose of sustaining one reputation on the ruins of another.”
[10]. Vide Mr. Henry Mayhew’s admirable pen and pencil sketches of “London Labour and the London Poor.”
[11]. It is a curious statistical fact that of twenty murders, accompanied with brutal violence, committed in 1862–3–4, the writer traced no less than eleven to inhabitants of England not native born. A more recent atrocity, the railway murder of Mr. Briggs, we owe to a German immigrant; the five preceding ones (out of eleven) to Irishmen, who bear a proportion to Englishmen as 5 to 150, or 1 in 30 of the population. Then comes in close sequence, the brutal assassination and mutilation of a German (Fuhrup) by his countryman Karl Kohl; and later we find recorded a knife and shillalah fight between Italians (Gregorio Mogni and Serafino Pelizzioni), who among them stabbed several persons and killed an Irishman, one Michael Harrington, the initiatory feud being the merits of Garibaldi on the Italian side, and his Holiness Pio Nono on the Irish.
[12]. This shows that the professors of gymnastics were numerous at the time.
[13].
“To Fig and Broughton he commits his breast,
To steel it to the fashionable test.”
And in Bramstone’s Man of Taste we read:—
“In Fig, the prize-fighter, by day delight.