"
After thus passing in survey the England of our ancestors five or six
generations back, the author closes his chapter with some eloquent
remarks upon the progress of society. Contrasting the hardness and
coarseness of the age of which he treats with the softer and more humane
features of our own, he says: "Nowhere could be found that sensitive and
restless compassion which has in our time extended powerful protection to
the factory child, the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries into
the stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship; which winces at every
lash laid on the back of a drunken soldier; which will not suffer the
thief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked; and which has repeatedly
endeavored to save the life even of the murderer. The more we study the
annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful
age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when
deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. Every
class, doubtless, has gained largely by this great moral change; but the
class which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the
most defenceless.
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