A glance at a few statistics will clearly show that moral deterioration keeps even pace with the intellectual. From 1810 to 1837, the number of criminals has annually increased, in certain districts, from 89 to 3,117; from 1836 to 1843, the average number of persons arrested each year in the manufacturing districts of York and Lancaster increased over 100 per cent., and the number of murderers 89 per cent.; from 1846 to 1850, the number of criminals in the Dorset district increased from 726 to 1,300, giving, in a population of 115,000 souls, 1 criminal to every 60 individuals. In London, the number of persons arrested in 1856 amounted to 73,260, whence it appears that about 1 inhabitant in every 40 passes through the hands of the police. Of the 200,000 criminal offences tried each year before the English tribunals, one-tenth part are committed by children, and 50,000 by persons less than twenty years of age. In London alone, 17,000 minors are yearly tried, which is 1 inhabitant in every 175; whereas the ratio for Paris is only 1 inhabitant in every 400. Mayhew computes that £42,000 are stolen during the year in the metropolis; and the London Examiner lately deplored that there should be less danger in crossing the great desert than in passing through some of the more remote suburbs of London at night. The story of a Professor Fagin, who gave private lessons in stealing, has often been regarded as a canard; but we read, in the Morning Chronicle, an advertisement in which one Professor Harris announces a similar course of instruction, and even promises his pupils to take them, for practice, to the theatres and other places of public resort. Among these startling fruits of British civilization must be included the 28 cases of polygamy which occurred in London in a single twelvemonth; the 12,770 illegitimate children born, during 1856, in the workhouses alone; the children market, held openly in a London street every Wednesday and Thursday, between the hours of six and seven, where parents exhibit their offspring for sale, or hire them out for infamous purposes. Such being the condition of an overwhelming majority of the people, it is no longer difficult to credit the existence of the new race which is now said to be growing up in England—a race whose civilization Dr. Shaw contrasts, rather disparagingly, with that of the African and the Indian. "After a careful investigation," says Dr. Shaw, "I have been forced to arrive at the conclusion that, while the moral, physical, intellectual, and educational status of the lowest English classes is about on the same level with that of the savage, they rank even below him in morals and customs."
And what has England, politically considered, done for the cause of civilization since cotton achieved its great triumph over corn? As one of the great powers of the Christian world, she has virtually abdicated. For national right and justice, for really oppressed nationalities, she has long ceased to upraise her voice or her arm. It is only when some Manchester cotton-lord suffers an injury in his pocket that her fleets threaten a bombardment. She is an asylum for the refuse of all nations, and freely permits the torch of the incendiary to be cast into the dwellings of her neighbors. Her literature, philosophy, religion, as well as her industry, trade, and diplomacy, are intended to hand the nations completely over to materialism. Wherever England's policy predominates, there virtue and simplicity, happiness and peace, disappear from the earth, and out of the ruins rises an arrogant and inordinate craving for the goods of this world. British influence has destroyed Portugal, weakened Spain, distracted Italy, and impaired the moral prestige of France. Her religious apathy encourages a degrading heathenism. Britain's political economy has inaugurated in Europe not only a serfdom of labor, but a serfdom of mind. The Scotchman, Ferguson, predicted that thought would become a trade, and Lasalle remarks that it has already become one in the hands of most English scholars. And these are the results of our much-vaunted civilization!
The pernicious example set by England in philosophy, poetry, and letters has unfortunately found but too many imitators on the Continent of Europe and elsewhere. Our literature is at present in the same condition in which it was in the days of Sophists and Greek decadence. When God desires to punish a civilized people—remarked some years ago an eloquent French pulpit orator—he visits them with such a swarm of unbelieving scholars as the clouds of locusts which he inflicted upon ancient Egypt. Men of perverse heads and corrupted hearts generate, in centuries which are called enlightened, a darkness upon which the goddess Genius of Knowledge sheds uncertain flashes, resembling the lightning which relieves the evening sky on the approach of a storm: The Sophists of ancient Greece were such heralds of impending wrath and desolation, and this class of men closely resemble the majority of our modern literati. If we compare the atheistic, material tendencies of a Protagoras, Antiphon, or Œnopides with our present progressive science; if we recall the time when Prodikus or Critias, in their efforts to destroy the religion of Greece, represented it as an invention of selfishness or of the ancient lawgivers; if Hippias offered himself to lecture on every conceivable subject, just as prominent writers now undertake to discuss all topics; if the latter again cloak their designs under the same phraseology; in short, when all this is once more re-enacted, then the parallel between that age and our own will be found almost perfect. The same class of scholars flourished in both eras; in both they claimed to be the high-priests of truth, although they are no more entitled to this honor than those whom Lucian describes leading the Syrian goddess on asses about the land. We live, in fact, in the days of a declining civilization, and nothing but a speedy return to the cardinal principles of Christianity can save us from relapsing into barbarism.
MATER CHRISTI.
Mother of Christ—then mother of us all:
Mother of God made man, of man made God:[97]
The thornless garden, the immaculate sod,
Whence sprang the Adam that reversed the fall.
Mother of Christ the Body Mystical;
Of us the members, as of him the Head:
Of him our life, the first-born from the dead;[98]
Of us baptized into his burial.[99]
Yes, Mother, we were truly born of thee
On Calvary's second Eden—thou its Eve:
Thy dolors were our birth-pangs by the tree
Whereon the second Adam died to live—
To live in us, thy promised seed to be,
Who then his death-wound to the snake didst give.
OUR LADY OF LOURDES.
FROM THE FRENCH OF HENRI LASSERRE.