The Executive is fast asleep in the matter—­or it would long ago have planted the Manchester district with a hundred thousand special constables—­and the globule of legislation now prescribed to Parliament, though excellent in certain respects, is null in others, would, if passed into law, rather encourage the intimidation of one man by twenty, and make him starve his family to save his skin—­cruel alternative—­and would not seriously check the darker and more bloody outrages, nor prevent their spreading from their present populous centers all over the land.  Seeing these things, I have drawn my pen against cowardly assassination and sordid tyranny; I have taken a few undeniable truths, out of many, and have labored to make my readers realize those appalling facts of the day which most men know, but not one in a thousand comprehends, and not one in a hundred thousand realizes, until Fiction—­which, whatever you may have been told to the contrary, is the highest, widest, noblest, and greatest of all the arts—­comes to his aid, studies, penetrates, digests the hard facts of chronicles and blue-books, and makes their dry bones live.