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 head master (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 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 for ever practising, 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?

They talk of murderers being pretty certainly found out.  Psha!  I have heard an authority awfully competent vow and declare that scores and hundreds of murders are committed, and nobody is the wiser.  That terrible man mentioned one or two ways of committing murder, which he maintained were quite common, and were scarcely ever found out.  A man, for instance, comes home to his wife, and . . . but I pause—­I know that this Magazine has a very large circulation.  Hundreds and hundreds of thousands—­why not say a million of people at once?—­well, say a million, read it.  And amongst these countless readers, I might be teaching some monster how to make away with his wife without being found out, some fiend