Just consider what life would be, if every rogue was found out, and flogged coram populo!  What a butchery, what an indecency, what an endless swishing of the rod!  Don’t cry out about my misanthropy.  My good friend Mealymouth, I will trouble you to tell me, do you go to church?  When there, do you say, or do you not, that you are a miserable sinner, and saying so do you believe or disbelieve it?  If you are a M. S., don’t you deserve correction, and aren’t you grateful if you are to be let off?  I say again what a blessed thing it is that we are not all found out!

Just picture to yourself everybody who does wrong being found out, and punished accordingly.  Fancy all the boys in all the school being whipped; and then the assistants, and then the headmaster (Dr. Badford let us call him).  Fancy the provost marshal being tied up, having previously superintended the correction of the whole army.  After the young gentlemen have had their turn for the faulty exercises, fancy Dr. Lincolnsinn being taken up for certain faults in his Essay and Review.  After the clergyman has cried his peccavi, suppose we hoist up a bishop, and give him a couple of dozen! (I see my Lord Bishop of Double-Gloucester sitting in a very uneasy posture on his right reverend bench.) After we have cast off the bishop, what are we to say to the Minister who appointed him?  My Lord Cinqwarden, it is painful to have to use personal correction to a boy of your age; but really . . .  Siste tandem carnifex!  The butchery is too horrible.  The hand drops powerless, appalled at the quantity of birch which it must cut and brandish.  I am glad we are not all found out, I say again; and protest, my dear brethren, against our having our deserts.

To fancy all men found out and punished is bad enough; but imagine all the women found out in the distinguished social circle in which you and I have the honor to move.  Is it not a mercy that a many of these fair criminals remain unpunished and undiscovered!  There is Mrs. Longbow, who is forever practicing, and who shoots poisoned arrows, too; when you meet her you don’t call her liar, and charge her with the wickedness she has done and is doing.  There is Mrs. Painter, who passes for a most respectable woman, and a model in society.  There is no use in saying what you really know regarding her and her goings on.  There is Diana Hunter—­what a little haughty prude it is; and yet we know stories about her which are not altogether edifying.  I say it is best for the sake of the good, that the bad should not all be found out.  You don’t want your children to know the history of that lady in the next box, who is so handsome, and whom they admire so.  Ah me, what would life be if we were all found out and punished for all our faults?  Jack Ketch would be in permanence; and then who would hang Jack Ketch?