population is supposed in itself to have.  “We move to multiplicity,” says Mr. Robert Buchanan.  “If there is one quality which seems God’s, and his exclusively, it seems that divine philoprogenitiveness, [239] that passionate love of distribution and expansion into living forms.  Every animal added seems a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new embodiment of his love.  He would swarm the earth with beings.  There are never enough.  Life, life, life,—­faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill every cranny.  Not a corner is suffered to remain empty.  The whole earth breeds, and God glories.”

It is a little unjust, perhaps, to attribute to the Divinity exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British Philistine, and the poorer class of Irish, may certainly claim to share with him; yet how inspiriting is here the whole strain of thought! and these beautiful words, too, I carry about with me in the East of London, and often read them there.  They are quite in agreement with the popular language one is accustomed to hear about children and large families, which describes children as sent.  And a line of poetry which Mr. Robert Buchanan throws in presently after the poetical prose I have quoted:—­

     ’Tis the old story of the fig-leaf time—­

this fine line, too, naturally connects itself, when one is in the East of London, with the idea of God’s [240] desire to swarm the earth with beings; because the swarming of the earth with beings does indeed, in the East of London, so seem to revive

     . . . the old story of the fig-leaf time—­

such a number of the people one meets there having hardly a rag to cover them; and the more the swarming goes on, the more it promises to revive this old story.  And when the story is perfectly revived, the swarming quite completed, and every cranny choke-full, then, too, no doubt, the faces in the East of London will be gleaming faces, which Mr. Robert Buchanan says it is God’s desire they should be, and which every one must perceive they are not at present, but, on the contrary, very miserable.

But to prevent all this philosophy and poetry from quite running away with us, and making us think with The Times, and our practical Liberal free-traders, and the British Philistines generally, that the increase of small houses and manufactories, or the increase of population, are absolute goods in themselves, to be mechanically pursued, and to be worshipped like fetishes,—­to prevent this, we have got that notion of ours immoveably fixed, of which I [241] have long ago spoken, the notion that culture, or the study of perfection, leads us to conceive of no perfection as being real which is not a general perfection, embracing all our fellow-men with whom we have to do.  Such is the sympathy which binds humanity together, that we are indeed, as our religion says, members of one body, and if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; individual perfection