Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/16

4 convulsions, changes, and tumults, which, had their proximate and apparent cause in the desire to avenge a tyrannous act done to a peasant's son—to punish insult offered to a craftsman s daughter—to keep from defilement one weak girl, claimed by a despotic ruler, in the market-place of superb Rome;—but whose root was in this established certainty; that in all human societies, great general injustice shall be checked, sooner or later, by individual resistance.

If, as I have said, it does not necessarily follow that the example of resistance is also the example of crowning wrong; so neither does it follow that there is tyranny greater than usual Enacted, when the benefactor arises, whose chivalrous nature sees cause for exertion, where other men saw none. Not even then, in the merit of the sufferers, or the degree of their suffering, lies the prospect of change; but" in the spirit of him who will not tamely contemplate any misery he thinks he might relieve. He follows in the track of those who have all "passed by on the other side;" but he differs from them in this, that he pauses to know what wounded and moaning thing is flung across his path, and forthwith accepts as his business, that task of rescue which more selfish and careless men have declined. The good Samaritan in Scripture addressed himself to no peculiar case; he lifted no bleeding hero from a disastrous battle-field; nor king writhing under the assassin's stroke. A man lay groaning who had fallen among thieves. That is all we shall ever know of the example of help, given as a lesson of charity eighteen hundred years ago, to the fleeting generations of the world!

In these later days of more complicated social wrong; when Howard rose amongst us, apostle of compassion to sufferers barred out of sight; our prisons were no worse than they had been, nor our prisoners better men; their dungeons were not darker, nor their food more scant, nor their sighing louder, nor their case more pitiful, than theirs who had gone before. Circumstance was the same, but the hazard of help had arrived.