“The sky was obscured by the smoke of hundreds of small chimneys and vast edifices, stretching in lines for miles and miles.  The latter were crowded with women and children, young in years, but withered in form and feature.  The countenances of the men were as colourless as the white fabric in their looms; their eyes sparkled with intelligence, but it was chiefly the intelligence of suffering, of privation, of keen sense of wrong, of inability to be better, of rankling hatred against existing institutions, and a furtive wish that some hideous calamity would bury them all in one common, undistinguishable ruin.

“’Are these the people? groaned the Queen, as the cold damp of more than mortal agony moistened her marble forehead.

“’Not all of them!” sounded the voice in her ear, so sharply that her Majesty looked up eagerly, and saw written, in letters of fire, on the palace wall:—­

“’1.  Every twelfth person in your dominions is a pauper, daily receiving parochial relief.

“’2.  Every twentieth person in your dominions is a destitute wanderer, with no roof but the sky—­no home but a prison.  They are the Ishmaelites of modern society; every one’s hand is against them, and their hands are against every one.

“’3.  There are in Freeland 10,743,747 females; divide that number by 500,000, and you will find that every twentieth woman in your dominions is—­Oh! horror piled on horror!—­a harlot!’”

Then follows the scene of a disconsolate female throwing herself over a bridge, the whole winding up with this charming piece of information, addressed by the genius to her Majesty:—­

“In your own land, liberty, the absence of which in another is deplored, is, in its most god-like development, but a name—­unless that may be termed liberty which practically is but vulgar license—­license to work from rosy morn to dark midnight for the most scanty pittances—­license to store up wealth in the hands and for the benefit of the few—­license to bellow lustily for rival politicians—­license to send children to ragged schools—­license to sot in the ale-house—­license to grow lumpish and brutal—­license to neglect the offices of religion, to swear, to lie, to blaspheme—­license to steal, to pander unchecked to the coarsest appetites, to fawn and slaver over the little great ones of the earth—­license to creep like a worm through life, or bound through it like a wild beast; and, last and most precious of all—­for it is untaxed—­license to starve, to rot, to die, and be buried in a foetid pauper’s grave, on which the sweet-smelling flowers, sent to strew the pathway of man and woman with beauty, love, and hope, will refuse to grow, much less bloom.”