forlorn brute whose wife and children have fled from him, and who spends his time between the police-cells and the resorts of the vilest.  If you could know the names of the tramps who yell and make merry over their supper in the murky kitchen, you would find that people of high consideration would be touched very painfully could they be reminded of the existence of certain relatives.  Degraded, degraded are they all!  And why?

The answer is brief, and I have left it until last, for no particular elaboration is needed.  From most painful study I have come to the conclusion that nearly all of our degraded men come to ruin through idleness in the first instance; drink, gambling, and other forms of debauch follow, but idleness is the root-evil.  The man who begins by saying, “It’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” or who refers to the danger of making Jack a dull boy, is on a bad road.  Who ever heard of a worker—­a real toiler—­becoming degraded?  Worn he may be, and perhaps dull to the influence of beauty and refinement; but there is always some nobleness about him.  The man who gives way to idleness at once prepares his mind as a soil for evil seeds; the universe grows tiresome to him; the life-weariness of the old Romans attacks him in an ignoble form, and he begins to look about for distractions.  Then his idleness, from being perhaps merely amusing, becomes offensive and suspicious; drink takes hold upon him; his moral sense perishes; only the husks of his refinement remain; and by and by you have the slouching wanderer who is good for nothing on earth.  He is despised of men, and, were it not that we know the inexhaustible bounty of the Everlasting Pity, we might almost think that he was forgotten of Heaven.  Stand against idleness.  Anything that age, aches, penury, hard trial may inflict on the soul is trifling.  Idleness is the great evil which leads to all others.  Therefore work while it is day.

September, 1888.

A REFINEMENT OF “SPORTING” CRUELTY.

I firmly believe in the sound manhood of the English people, and I know that in any great emergency they would rise and prove themselves true and gallant of soul; but we happen for the time to have amongst us a very large class of idlers, and these idlers are steadily introducing habits and customs which no wise observer can regard without solemn apprehensions.  The simple Southampton poet has told us what “idle hands” are apt to do under certain guidance, and his saying—­truism as it appears—­should be studied with more regard to its vital meaning.  The idlers crave for novelties; they seek for new forms of distraction; they seem really to live only when they are in the midst of delirious excitement.  Unhappily their feverish unrest is apt to communicate itself to men who are not naturally idlers, and thus their influence moves outwards like some vast hurtful wind blown from a pestilent region.  During the past few years the idlers have invented a form of amusement which for sheer atrocity and wanton cruelty is unparalleled in the history of England.  I shall say some words about this remarkable amusement, and I trust that gentle women who have in them the heart of compassion, mothers who have sons to be ruined, fathers who have purses to bleed, may aid in putting down an evil that gathers strength every day.