insinuated that Tom Thumb made his giants
first, and then killed them, but you cannot do
the like by your Pariahs. You cannot get
an exclusive patent for the manufacture and
destruction of Pariah dolls. Other Honorable
Gentlemen are certain to engage in the trade;
and when the Honorable Member for
Whitened Sepulchres makes his Pariahs of
all these people, you cannot refuse to recognise
them as being of the genuine sort, Lord
Ashley. Railway and all other Sunday Travelling,
suppressed, by the Honorable Member
for Whitened Sepulchres, the same honorable
gentleman, who will not have been
particularly complimented in the course of that
achievement by the Times Newspaper, will
discover that a good deal is done towards the
Times of Monday, on a Sunday night, and
will Pariah the whole of that immense
establishment. For, this is the great
inconvenience of Pariah-making, that when you
begin, they spring up like mushrooms:
insomuch, that it is very doubtful whether we
shall have a house in all this land, from the
Queen's Palace downward, which will not be
found, on inspection, to be swarming with
Pariahs. Not touch the Mails, and yet abolish the
Mail-bags? Stop all those silent messengers
of affection and anxiety, yet let the talking
traveller, who is the cause of infinitely more
employment, go? Why, this were to suppose
all men Fools, and the Honorable Member
for Whitened Sepulchres even a greater
Noodle than he is!

Lord Ashley supports his motion by reading
some perilous bombast, said to be written
by a working man––of whom the intelligent
body of working men have no great reason,
to our thinking, to be proud––in which there
is much about not being robbed of the
boon of the day of rest; but, with all Lord
Ashley's indisputably humane and benevolent
impulses, we grieve to say we know no robber
whom the working man, really desirous to
preserve his Sunday, has so much to dread, as
Lord Ashley himself. He is weakly lending
the influence of his good intentions to a
movement which would make that day no day of
rest–––rest to those who are overwrought,
includes recreation, fresh air, change––but a
day of mortification and gloom. And this
not to one class only, be it understood.
This is not a class question. If there be no
gentleman of spirit in the House of
Commons to remind Lord Ashley that the high-
flown nonsense he quoted, concerning labour,
is but another form of the stupidest socialist
dogma, which seeks to represent that
there is only one class of laborers on earth,
it is well that the truth should be stated
somewhere. And it is, indisputably, that
three-fourths of us are laborers who work
hard for our living; and that the condition
of what we call the working-man, has its
parallel, at a remove of certain degrees, in
almost all professions and pursuits. Running
through the middle classes, is a broad deep
vein of constant, compulsory, indispensable
work. There are innumerable gentlemen,
and sons and daughters of gentlemen,
constantly at work, who have no more hope of
making fortunes in their vocation, than the
working man has in his. There are
innumerable families in which the day of rest,
is the only day out of the seven, where
innocent domestic recreations and enjoyments
are very feasible. In our mean gentility,
which is the cause of so much social
mischief, we may try to separate ourselves, as
to this question, from the working-man; and
may very complacently resolve that there is
no occasion for his excursion-trains and tea-
gardens, because we don't use them; but we
had better not deceive ourselves. It is
impossible that we can cramp his means of
needful recreation and refreshment, without
cramping our own, or basely cheating him.
We cannot leave him to the Christian patronage
of the Honourable Member for Whitened
Sepulchres, and take ourselves off. We cannot
restrain him and leave ourselves free. Our
Sunday wants are pretty much the same as
his, though his are far more easily satisfied;
our inclinations and our feelings are pretty
much the same; and it will be no less wise
than honest in us, the middle classes, not to
be Janus-faced about the matter.

What is it that the Honorable Member
for Whitened Sepulchres, for whom Lord
Ashley clears the way, wants to do? He sees
on a Sunday morning, in the large towns of
England, when the bells are ringing for
church and chapel, certain unwashed, dim-
eyed, dissipated loungers, hanging about the
doors of public-houses, and loitering at the
street corners, to whom the day of rest
appeals in much the same degree as a sunny
summer-day does to so many pigs. Does he
believe that any weight of handcuffs on the
Post-Office, or any amount of restriction
imposed on decent people, will bring Sunday
home to these ? Let him go, any Sunday
morning, from the new Town of Edinburgh
where the sound of a piano would be
profanation, to the old Town, and see what Sunday
is in the Canongate. Or let him get up some
statistics of the drunken people in Glasgow,
while the churches are full––and work out
the amount of Sabbath observance which is
carried downward, by rigid shows and sad-
colored forms.

But, there is another class of people, those
who take little jaunts, and mingle in social
little assemblages, on a Sunday, concerning
whom the whole constituency of Whitened
Sepulchres, with their Honorable Member in
the chair, find their lank hair standing on end
with horror, and pointing, as if they were all
electrified, straight up to the skylights of
Exeter Hall. In reference to this class, we
would whisper in the ears of the disturbed
assemblage, three short words, "Let well
alone!"

The English people have long been