Let
wretchedness do its work; do not interfere with death.
"It matters nothing to me," said a rich man who heard of a poor woman
and her sick child being driven forth from a town for begging. The
workhouse authorities would have nothing to do with her, and sent her
away. But the poor woman went and sat down with her child at the rich
man's door; the child died there; the contagion of typhus was wafted
into the gilded saloon and the luxurious bed-chamber and the rich man's
child fell a victim to the disease.
But Nobody has considerably less power in society than he once had: and
our hope is, that he may ultimately follow in the wake of Old Bogie, and
disappear altogether. Wherever there is suffering and social depression,
we may depend upon it that Somebody is to blame. The responsibility
rests somewhere; and if we allow it to remain, it rests with us. We may
not be able to cope with the evil as individuals, single-handed; but it
becomes us to unite, and bring to bear upon the evil the joint moral
power of society in the form of a law. A Law is but the expression of a
combined will; and it does that for society, which society, in its
individual and separate action, cannot so well or efficiently do for
itself. Laws may do too much; they may meddle with things which ought to
be "let alone;" but the abuse of a thing is no proper argument against
its use, in cases where its employment is urgently called for.
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