penitentiaries, and overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin. This thought was the motive that led him throughout his whole life to try to arouse sympathetic interest of the most active kind in the conditions and circumstances of the poor. One of his most striking appeals to thoughtful people is made in Martin Chuzzlewit. These profound words will always be worthy of careful study by teachers and reformers: Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in God's highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift descent of men who have lived in their own esteem, that there are scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a chance of life! Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled! And, oh! ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see that it be human first. Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and the sleep of generations, into the nature of the beasts. Dickens saw clearly the depravity of human nature, but he looked beyond the depravity to its cause, and he found a natural cause for the degradation, but not the cause that had been commonly assigned. He taught that the highest and holiest elements in human nature were the causes of its swiftest deterioration when misused, perverted, or neglected. Alice Marwood, in Dombey and Son, was introduced to teach parents and society in general the duties they owe to childhood, and to show how lives are wrecked by neglect and by a false use of power. When she returned, an outcast, to her mother, and her mother upbraided her, the young woman said: "I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me as well as you. Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder. What else did you expect?" "Harder to me! To her own dear mother!" cried the old woman. 66 "I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't," she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and compressed lips, as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling from her breast. Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?" "I!" cried the old woman. mother dutiful to her own child! " "To my own gal! A "It sounds unnatural, don't it?" returned the daughter, looking coldly on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; "but I have thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then-to pass away the time-whether no one ever owed any duty to me." Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether angrily, or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical infirmity, did not appear. "There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter with a laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself, "born among poverty and neglect, and nurtured in it. Nobody taught her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her." 66 Nobody! " echoed the mother, pointing to herself and striking her breast. 66 "The only care she knew," returned the daughter, was to be beaten, and stinted, and abused sometimes; and "There she might have done better without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have been hunted and worried to death for ugliness." "Go on! go on! " exclaimed the mother. "She'll soon have ended," said the daughter. was a criminal called Alice Marwood-a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And she was tried, and she was sentenced. And Lord, how the gentlemen in the court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty, and on her having perverted the gifts of Natureas if he didn't know better than anybody there that they had been made curses to her!-and how he preached about the strong arm of the Law-so very strong to save her, when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch! and how solemn and religious it all was! I have thought of that many times since, to be sure! 99 She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that made the howl of the old woman musical. "So Alice Marwood was transported, mother," she pursued, "and was sent to learn her duty where there was twenty times less duty, and more wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is come back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the gentlemen needn't be afraid of being thrown out of work. There's crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the streets they live in, that'll keep them to it till they've made their fortunes." Bleak House is one of the greatest of the educational works of Dickens. One of its chief aims was to arouse a sympathetic interest in the lives of poor children. The Neckett children, Charlotte, and Tom, and Emma, revealed a new world to many thousands of good people. 66 Charley, Charley! " said my guardian. are you?" "Over thirteen, sir," replied the child. 66 "How old “Oh! what a great age," said my guardian. a great age, Charley! 99 "What "And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my guardian. 66 Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect confidence, "since father died." "And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley," said my guardian, turning his face away for a moment, "how do you live?" 66 Since my father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing to-day." "God help you, Charley! "said my guardian. not tall enough to reach the tub!" "You're "In pattens I am, sir," she said, quickly. "I've got a high pair as belonged to mother." "And when did mother die? Poor mother! " "Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home, and did cleaning and nursing and washing, for a long time before I began to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir? "And do you often go out?" 66 "As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes, and smiling, because of earning sixpences and shillings! " "And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?" 99 "To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see? said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play, you know, and Tom ain't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom? 66 99 No-o!" said Tom stoutly. "When it comes on dark the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright—almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?" "Yes, Charley," said Tom; "almost quite bright." The hearts must be hard that are not moved to a deeper and more practical interest in the children of the poor by this pathetic story, and others of a kindred character which Dickens told over and over again for the Christian world to study. And the study led to feeling and thought and co-operative action. The fruits of these wonderful stories are the splendid homes, and organizations for children, and the laws to protect them from cruelty by parents or teachers, or employers, and the free public schools to educate them, and the joy, and happiness, and freedom, that are taking the place of the sorrow, and tears, and coercion of the time when Dickens began his noble work. The tragic story of poor Jo illustrated the poverty, the ignorance, the destitution, the hopelessness, the barrenness, and the dreadful environment of a London street boy. The world has done much better since, as Dickens prophesied it would do, and the good work is going on. Hundreds of thousands of the poor Joes of London are now in the public schools of London alone of whom the Christian philanthropy of the world thought little till Dickens told his stories. In Nobody's Story Dickens returns to his special purpose of changing the attitude of civilization toward the education of the poor. The Bigwigs represent society, and "the man" means the poor man. But the Bigwig family broke out into violent family quarrels concerning what it was lawful to teach to this man's children. Some of the family insisted on such a thing being primary and indispensable above all other things; and others of the family insisted on such another thing being primary and indispensable above all other things; and the Bigwig family, rent into factions, wrote pamphlets, held convocations, delivered charges, orations, and all varieties of discourses; impounded one another in courts Lay and courts Ecclesiastical; threw dirt, exchanged pummellings, and fell together by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this man, in his short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise there, and take his children to itself. He saw his daughter perverted into a heavy slatternly drudge; he saw his son go moping down the ways of low sensuality, to brutality and crime; he saw the dawning light of intelligence in the eyes of his babies so changing into cunning and suspicion, that he could have rather wished them idiots. Dickens objected to a certain kind of sentimentality exhibited in his day toward criminals, and draws a very |