C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

‘Blackwood's Magazine,’ an authority not likely to be charged with hostility towards the British oligarchy, nor with favoritism towards our republic, said in speaking on this same subject in the same year—1840—

‘It were well if some ingenious optician could invent an instrument which would remedy the defects of that long-sighted benevolence which sweeps the field for distant objects of compassion, while it is blind as a bat to the misery around its own doors.’

Well said! I saw and felt it all when I went through the streets and lanes and cellars of Manchester, where fifty thousand blanched skeleton men, women, and children were, slowly or rapidly, dying of starvation. In that city, also, vast anti-slavery meetings were got up to induce the North to put down slavery in the South. These assemblages were invariably under the auspices of the aristocracy, and they were held where the police were stationed at the doorways to drive off the famishing, lest their plaint of hunger might salute the ears of their bloated task-masters.

There was no lack of cotton in Manchester then. There was something worse than that. It was the same old complaint you will find in any part of England,—the poor over-worked and under-fed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

I went up to Paisley, where more than half the population were being fed from soup-kettles,—and pretty poor soup at that. There, too, the abolition of American slavery seemed to be the only thing which drew forth the sympathies or reached the charity of the aristocratic classes.