Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/207

194 of a nation as a disease incident to the childhood of mankind, and to exposure amongst pernicious circumstances, not natural to man's constitution, but only native to certain conditions and stages of development; and these doctors of humanity seek to help mankind remove the outward occasion, and overcome the inward and transient impulse to this wrong.

Now, in these four countries, for fifty or a hundred years past, there has been a progressive dimmution of vice. The amount of abnormal action first becomes smaller in proportion to the whole action, and to the whole property, a smaller fraction of the total action of the people. The amount of tare is diminished. But next, the bad quality of vice also diminished The old error of violence disappears; the milder vices take its place. The chief object of vicious attack is not the substance of man, his person; it is an accident of man, his estate. Vices of violent instinct—lust, revenge, diminish and shade off into vices of reflective calculation—ambition, acquisitiveness, and the like.

Then, as a third thing, vice is getting confined to a smaller class of persons. Once, it was at most universal. Such vice was instantial, virtue the exception* In the age before Homer, every Greek skipper was also a pirate. Now, vice permanently infects but a small body of persons; first, the perishing class, whom poverty and its consequent ignorance makes offenders ; second, the professional villains, not ignorant, not necessarily poor,—for in the division of labour in modern society, general villany has become a profession, whereof there are various specialities—pickpockets, burglars, thieves, forgers, and the like the same spirit of villany having divers manifestations.

So the general abnormal action is getting corrected. First, the snow is getting thin everywhere; next, it becomes less cold in all or most places; third, it gets melted away from the open land, and only lies in a few great heaps, covered up. with dust, or is stretched in long fines where the walls hide it from the summer's sun. Men are attacking also this residue of ice and snow, carting it off to sunnier spots : and so the world is getting moralized; and though fresh snow falls on the ground, yet the neck of vice's winter must be considered broke. The moralization