Put Yourself in His Place

C >> Charles Reade >> Put Yourself in His Place


The London press took this up; two or three members of the House of
Commons, wild, eccentric men, who would not betray their country to
secure their re-election to some dirty borough, sided with outraged law;
and by these united efforts a Commission was obtained. The Commission
sat, and, being conducted with rare skill and determination, squeezed
out of an incredible mass of perjury some terrible truths, whose
discovery drew eloquent leaders from the journals; these filled simple
men, who love their country, with a hope that the Government of this
nation would shake off its lethargy, and take stringent measures to
defend the liberty of the subject against so cruel and cowardly a
conspiracy, and to deprive the workmen, in their differences with the
masters, of an unfair and sanguinary weapon, which the masters could
use, but never have as YET; and, by using which, the workmen do
themselves no lasting good, and, indeed, have driven whole trades and
much capital out of the oppressed districts, to their own great loss.

That hope, though not extinct, is fainter now than it was. Matters seem
going all the other way. An honest, independent man, who did honor to
the senate, has lost his seat solely for not conniving at these Trades
outrages, which the hypocrites, who have voted him out, pretend to
denounce. Foul play is still rampant and triumphant. Its victims were
sympathized with for one short day, when they bared their wounds to the
Royal Commissioners; but that sympathy has deserted them; they are now
hidden in holes and corners from their oppressors, and have to go by
false names, and are kept out of work; for odisse quem loeseris is
the fundamental maxim of their oppressors. Not so the assassins: they
flourish. I have seen with these eyes one savage murderer employed at
high wages, while a man he all but destroyed is refused work on all
hands, and was separated by dire poverty from another scarred victim,
his wife, till I brought them together. Again, I have seen a wholesale
murderer employed on the very machine he had been concerned in blowing
up, employed on it at the wages of three innoxious curates. And I find
this is the rule, not the exception. "No punishment but for already
punished innocence; no safety but for triumphant crime."

The Executive is fast asleep in the matter--or it would long ago
have planted the Manchester district with a hundred thousand special
constables--and the globule of LEGISLATION now prescribed to Parliament,
though excellent in certain respects, is null in others, would, if
passed into law, rather encourage the intimidation of one man by twenty,
and make him starve his family to save his skin--cruel alternative--and
would not seriously check the darker and more bloody outrages, nor
prevent their spreading from their present populous centers all over
the land. Seeing these things, I have drawn my pen against cowardly
assassination and sordid tyranny; I have taken a few undeniable truths,
out of many, and have labored to make my readers realize those appalling
facts of the day which most men know, but not one in a thousand
comprehends, and not one in a hundred thousand REALIZES, until
Fiction--which, whatever you may have been told to the contrary, is the
highest, widest, noblest, and greatest of all the arts--comes to his
aid, studies, penetrates, digests the hard facts of chronicles and
blue-books, and makes their dry bones live.