So the truth is; but unfortunately it is only where accurate knowledge is stimulated by affection, that we are able to feel it.  Persons who live beyond our own circle, and still more persons who have lived in another age, receive what is called justice, not charity; and justice is supposed to consist in due allotments of censure for each special act of misconduct, leaving merit unrecognized.  There are many reasons for this harsh method of judging.  We must decide of men by what we know, and it is easier to know faults than to know virtues.  Faults are specific, easily described, easily appreciated, easily remembered.  And again, there is, or may be, hypocrisy in virtue; but no one pretends to vice who is not vicious.  The bad things which can be proved of a man we know to be genuine.  He was a spendthrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he fought a duel.  These are blots positive, unless untrue, and when uncorrected tinge the whole character.

This also is to be observed in historical criticism.  All men feel a necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own expense, or at another’s.  If they cannot part with their faults, they will at least call them by their right name when they meet with such faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of deeds of violence or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice of man to man, of great and extensive suffering, or any of those other misfortunes which the selfishness of men has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate the doers of such things, and the age which has permitted them to be done, with the full emphasis of virtuous indignation, while all the time they are themselves doing things which will be described, with no less justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous posterity.

Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings of the poor in the days of serfdom and villanage; yet the records of the strikes of the last ten years, when told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less fertile in tragedy.  We speak of famines and plagues under the Tudors and Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and the Irish plague of 1847, the last page of such horrors which has yet been turned over, is the most horrible of all We can conceive a description of England during the year which has just closed over us, true in all its details, containing no one statement which can be challenged, no single exaggeration which can be proved.  And this description, if given without the correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why the Cities of the Plain were destroyed, and England was allowed to survive.  The frauds of trusted men, high in power and high in supposed religion; the whole-sale poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food —­nay, of almost everything exposed for sale—­the cruel usage of women—­children murdered for the burial fees —­life and property insecure in open day in the open streets—­splendour such as the world never saw before upon earth, with