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We have not reached perfection by any means. When we begin to think we have, we are sure to fall back. Another good office the State Children's Department fills is that of advice gratis. One of the most striking chapters in Gen. Booth's "Darkest England" dealt with the helplessness of the poor and the ignorant in the face of difficulties, of injustice, and of extortion.
There are compensations in every condition of life. The difference in the lot of the rich and the poor is not so great as is generally imagined. The rich man has often to pay a heavy price for his privileges. He is anxious about his possessions. He may be the victim of extortion. He is apt to be cheated. He is the mark for every man's shaft.
The obedient provinces had been purged of Protestants; while crippled, too, by confiscation, they offered no field for further extortion. From Holland and Zealand, whence Catholicism had been nearly excluded, the King of Spain was nearly excluded also.
Are you not going to say anything about the money makers, the rascals who raked together great fortunes in a few years by wholesale fraud and extortion?" "Pardon me, I was just coming to them," said the doctor.
For these I gave up all my portmanteau, with the exception of six silk handkerchiefs, and received fifty shillings, when I ought to have received, at least, ten pounds; but I could not well help myself, and I submitted to the extortion.
Some had lost near relatives, executed for some trifling offence by the tribunals, some had been ruined by the extortion of the tax gatherers. All were stated to be ready to give their lives for vengeance. "These agents of ours, you see, Malchus, are not for the most part animated by any feeling of pure patriotism, it is their own wrongs and not the injuries of Carthage which they would avenge.
Yet, after the lapse of two years, we find the same system of extortion prevailing, and robbery has grown more unblushing in its exactions as it feels secure in its immunity from punishment, and that species of fraud which shocked the nation in the spring of 1861 has been increasing.
I might enlarge on what I have written, and point out the injustice and the gross system of extortion practised by the Government in making Johannesburg pay something like £7 per head for the education of Dutch children, whilst it has to pay from £5 to £15 per annum for the education of each child of its own, meanwhile leaving hundreds growing up in the blackest ignorance and crime.
Yet if we consider the state and splendour with which the Proconsuls were surrounded, and the opportunities afforded them for almost legalized plunder and extortion, we must confess that this insensibility to the common objects of human cupidity was the token of no ordinary mind.
It is true, that many an unfortunate fellow-citizen in Suffolk had been made to feel how close was the gripe of his hand, when he found himself in its grasp; but there is a way of practising the most ruthless extortion, that serves not only to deceive the world, but which would really seem to mislead the extortioner himself.
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