ideas which, unswayed by party, he communicated to his countrymen. Let England weep reverent tears over John Bright's grave, and weeping may she learn that true greatness grows in a soil underlaid by the rock of moral principle, and not by the shifting sands of expediency. CHAPTER IX. THE CHURCH AND THE EAST END. It is some time now since we parted company with the proletaire. We left him for a time, to give our attention to the problem, how to prevent him from propagating his kind, and to the other problem, how to organise industry so as to lessen the number and intensity of those disturbances of trade, in which so many settle down from the other strata of society into the condition of the proletariat. But we cannot abandon him altogether to his fate, in the hope that his species will die out in a generation or so. Such a course is forbidden by our natural ethic, which in its higher categories requires us to leave no one to perish in whom there is any hope of life. The treatment of the parent proletaire must be grounded on our two principles, first, that it is the duty of the morally weak to yield to the morally strong; and secondly, that it is the duty of the morally strong to incarnate itself through sympathy in the nature of the morally weak, and thereby infuse its own strength into the other's weakness. The first of these principles, of course, will not be voluntarily accepted by the proletaire. He will kick against the pricks, and try to dodge them too as long as he can. But our principle is the moral justification for the State stepping in and making him do what he will not, and therefore cannot initiate for himself. Carlyle saw this long ago; and that was why he said that to save society the State must take these will-less men, put them into gangs, and drill them to labour. We in this country have not quite risen to the height of his thought yet. We still treat the moral refuse as senselessly as we treat the physical refuse of our towns. The latter we send seawards in our rivers, with spread of deadly poison in the air and impoverishment of our fields. The former, when it so often impedes the steps of our civilisation, we send to congenial company in the convict prisons, to perfect itself in the art of crime, and be let loose again upon society. The analogy would be complete if we could devise any machinery for lifting our physical refuse from the ocean again, and deluging our streets with it. The higher accomplishment in villany with which the criminal emerges from prison would be matched by the increased deadly potency of the physical refuse after its |