Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/373

368 in power and wickedness—beings, whose society, if they were merely human, would be systematically shunned by the wise and the good; whose movements would be scrupulously watched by the myrmidons of a vigilant magistracy; whose most frequent homes ought to be the penitentiary or the jail; and whose exit from the stage of time might well be the penalty-consecrated pathway of the most reprobate of felons! Think of all this, with seriousness and sobriety, and then say, whether the unavoidable tendency of the whole be not to blunt the sense of decency—to extinguish all feeling of delicacy—to replenish the imagination with thoughts of impurity—to pollute the best of the affections—to sear and deaden the conscience, and so render it insensible to the distinctions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood; to stunt the growth of every nobler and more generous aspiration—to excite into inordinate development every grosser and more prurient inclination of the naturally corrupt heart; in a word, to habituate to scenes, sentiments, and practices which cannot fail to issue in a depravation of all morals and a deterioration of all manly character. And yet, is not this, with exceptions so few, and modifications so partial and unimportant, as not materially to affect the general estimate—is not this indisputably, in its broad and characteristic lineaments, a painful but a faithful portraiture of the actual condition of the great masses of the native population?

From a picture so deplorable of the wholly uninstructed many, who are thus entirely abandoned to the education of circumstances, it may be thought that some relief must be found in turning the eyes away and fixing them on the variously instructed few. In other more highly favoured lands, such relief is to be found as an ever ready refuge. In Great Britain it is calculated that there may be a million of youth without any means of school instruction, and several millions of adults that exhibit the bitter fruits of ignorance, and so entail on society at large the retributive awards of its criminal neglect. But there, if, at the foundations of the social pyramid, we are painfully compelled to behold a huge chaotic congeries of base materials, such as iron mixed with clay, we may, above these, be cheered with the spectacle of a finer stratum of brass—on which may be superimposed another of silver—while the whole may be seen surmounted with a head or apex of gold. As to the cultivation of intellect, and the acquisition of useful knowledge, are there not thousands and even tens of thousands who have reached the highest standard to which civilized humanity has yet attained? Witness the effects! effects which, in real, tangible, visible forms, seem almost to outstrip the fabled metamorphoses of antiquity. What changes, what transitions,