Your skill in Orchid cultivation
Has given us a conquered nation;—
But,—make you Premier? Oh, go slow,
Joe!
SAVAGE LONDON
There are more than one hundred and eighty religious Sects in England;—and all of them have Representatives in London. There are innumerable Charity Organization Societies,—Missions without end,—Relief Funds with Centre Offices and Branch Offices in London. There is much preaching, much lecturing, much writing;—yet, when all is said, done, and written, the grim result is the same,—namely that the squalor, filth, vice, ignorance, recklessness, wretchedness, and brutality of the great Majority of the Poor in our wealthy English metropolis is a crying scandal, and “a rank offence that smells to heaven.” The religious sects meet often and discuss much,—beginning their discussions generally with a bombastical flow of oratory, and ending in a violent wrangle over some knotty point of doctrine, while the miserable creatures who cry to them for relief, cry in vain to ears that are deafened by selfishness and plugged up with conceit. A great deal too much of the money subscribed to charitable Societies goes to pay secretaries and underlings, and many and many a starving wretch has been turned ruthlessly away unaided from the doors of a stately building, flagrantly announcing itself as a “Refuge for the Destitute.” Yet nowhere are there such large sums subscribed to Foreign Missions as in London;—the Kaffir, the Zulu, the “Heathen Chinee,”—all these may appeal to London and be sure of a favourable answer. Dukes and Earls who love to see their names blazoned on lists of charitable donations would appear, from what is said about them in print, to take a deep interest in the whole world, except that particular portion of the globe from which they derive their own magnificent revenues,—and thousands of pounds are spent annually in reforming and civilizing the savage tribes of the desert and forest. Yet in the face of all this philanthropy, the horrible, almost incredible miseries of the London poor daily increase, and we know for a fact that, while money is constantly subscribed for the conversion of the foreign heathen to holy Christianity, an enormous population of native heathen, far more degraded than the most uncultured desert barbarians, swarm at the very doors of the wealthy would-be benefactors of humanity, and demand redress for their bitter and long-standing wrongs. It is a sorrow and scandal to us that it should be so; but so it is.
The neglect of years, and the rapid turn of the wheel of modern progress, has produced the London Savage,—a being more wild, more reckless and terrible than the most bloodthirsty Zulu that ever revelled in human gore. He may be met anywhere;—he lurks in dens behind some of the stateliest mansions of Kensington and Belgravia. Rolling in filthy straw, in company with several other savages like himself, who, with their wives and children, all lie together in one damp, dark, foul-smelling room, he lays his plans of robbery and murder with the same equanimity and self-applause as a fashionable preacher pens his sermon for the coming Sunday. He knows no difference between virtue and vice,—morality or the reverse. His reasoning is simple,—in fact, quite primitive;—if someone else happens to have what he wants and does not possess, such as a gold watch, for instance, or a purse of money, he considers himself justified in taking it, if not by persuasion, then by force. If he commits murder, he is perhaps caught and sentenced to be hung. Does he care? Has he any remorse? Any dread of death? Not he! He goes to the gallows with entire fortitude and dies like an ill-used martyr. His children remember him as such, and follow his example in due time, so that the hangman is still a necessary official.