No credit, then, to the aristocracy—no blame to the poor! Neither can help being what they are. The influences of the sphere of refinement must have a tendency to refine: the miseries of the poor must produce degradation, immorality, and recklessness.
Ah! my Lord Duke—how ineffable is your contempt for yon poor trembling wretch who now stands in the dock at the Old Bailey, before his judge! Your Grace never did a dishonourable action—your Grace has never committed even a crime so genteel as forgery! But has your Grace ever known what starvation is? has your Grace wandered for hours, like a madman, through the streets of a city teeming with all the luxuries of the earth, while a wife and children were weeping for bread in a cheerless garret up some filthy court? No—your Grace has never been placed in such a position; or, believe me, you would probably have purloined a loaf of bread or filched a handkerchief or a purse—even as did that poor trembling wretch in the dock, whose guilt has filled your Grace with so much disgust!
And you, too, my Lady Duchess—how closely your Grace wraps that elegant, warm shawl around your form, lest its mere hem should happen to touch the garments of that poor unfortunate girl who is passing just at the moment when your Grace is stepping from the Opera-door into the splendid equipage which is to whirl your Grace to your palace-home! Oh! I well understand the loathing—the disgust which the menaced contact with that wretched creature excites in the bosom of your Grace. But—ah! does she deserve no pity—no sympathy, as well as such sovereign contempt—such boundless aversion? The entire sex is not outraged by her fall;—and consider, my lady Duchess—had you been a poor man's daughter and so hemmed in by miseries of all kinds from your very birth until the age of womanhood, that emancipation from such incessant privations were a very paradise, even though purchased by a crime,—thinkest thou, my lady, that thy virtue would have been stronger than that of the poor wretch who seems to insult you by even breathing the same air that surrounds your aristocracy?
Merciful heavens! how unjust the upper classes are to the lower! The great lord and the haughty lady blame where they should pity—turn away with loathing where they should commiserate—proclaim as innate wickedness that social aspect which is the inevitable result of poverty and oppression—denounce as inveterately depraved those unhappy beings who never were taught nor had a chance to be good!