FIFTY YEARS AGO.

Marlborough Press, Volume I, Issue 10, 9 March 1860, Page 3

FIFTY YEARS AGO.

It being such a common practice to depreciate the present age and deplore, the absence of the " good old time,” it is somewhat cheering to find the leading journal thus hopefully viewing the present :

In former days, without any want of feeling, people seem to have looked upon all these .things simply as facts, that were necessary, unavoidable, and so on. But as for really trying to deal with them or entering into any combat with fate, it never occurred to these worthy people, except to an extraordinary philanthropist or two. So they stood by with folded arms, and saw the ravages of wholesale disease and want, without an idea that they were put into any other position than that of spectators of one very unfavourable side of the world in which they were. Fifty years ago a soldier had 1,000 lashes for the merest trifle, society looked on, and did not even see the slightest severity in it; judges,.comrades, and even bystanders felt no indignation —much less horror. It was not that people were exactly cruel, but they looked upon everything as a matter of course; it was law and custom ; their ideas of justice were accommodated to the facts of the day, instead of those facts being tested by our internal principle justice. They never reasoned, they took the world as they found it. All that is altered now. Society looks upon evil as something to be met and dealt with, and no longer stands passive in the matter. There is an active, inquiring, busy, penetrating intellectual spirit of benevolence which has come in, and which does not let people rest, but sets them to work, first asking themselves questions, then asking other people questions, then ferreting out the history of cases, then arranging plans and methods of appeal, bringing people together systematising efforts, and combining forces, It may be true that when this machinery has been constructed a mechanical spirit may to more or less extent creep into the agency and working of our benevolent schemes; every one who attends a committee meeting, or who puts his name to a packet of printed letters, is not a Howard, but nothing but the true spirit oi benevolence at the bottom could have erected this machinery, or could effectively keep it going. People will not now consent to regard human misery as simply an insoluble problem,, as it that was all to he said or thought about if.. They want to grapple with the fact, not as if they could master it, hut still as if they could do a good deal in developing the great economy of relief, of which the foundations are so deeply laid in nature moral and physical. It may be very wrong for an age to flatter itself, but we cannot but observe facts, especially as to observe them is not only a plain act of justice to the generous but also tends to increase, and spread the, spirit. People do what other people do, and what we think right is matter of sympathy, after all, a good deal more than of our own individual judgment. The more charity is observed, then, to he the order of the day the more followers and adherents it will have.