most melancholy spectacle; but is it not much more melancholy to see on so vast a scale the dignity of man in ruins? Do you not feel it an awful consideration as you traverse the city, that there constantly rests on a few square miles around you, a measure of vice sufficient to poison an universe of corruptible beings? Do you not feel something like what might have been felt by a man standing amidst the streams of Egypt, when Moses had turned the waters into blood? If depravity as an abstraction could be clothed in a form which should render it perceptible by the eyes, the collective depravity of this magnificent city would be the most terrific and ominous apparition that man ever beheld. The fires and smokes that ascended from Sodom on its final morning, were not so dreadful an appearance as would be such a vision of its wickedness, and as would be such a vision of the vice of a modern great city. I do not think this is the language of excess. Even a man who would take only the laws of the land for his rule of judging, if he believe, or nearly believe, the statements and conjectures of the author of the "Police of the Metropolis," will stand aghast at the view. How much more melancholy, then, must it appear to a Christian moralist, who applies, even in the most candid spirit, the laws which determine the opinion of the Judge of the world!

It may be said, that if not a house of this city had ever been built, yet the persons who now inhabit it, wherever they had been scattered, would have had their vices. Yes, and those vices would have been too much for the happiness and moral beauty of the widest extent of inhabited country, over which they could have been diffused and attenuated. But in this scattered state they could not have stood up to view with the size and aspect of a frightful monster, such as they become when concentrated into a tremendous aggregate in one place. And their malignant effect would have been much less, as they must have operated in detail and unconnected, not as in the combined powers of a prodigious engine. The scattered, minute pieces of depravity, if I may use the expression, would have had only the power of wasps and spiders; by their conjunction they become a hydra with many and immortal heads. Scattered vice could nowhere have had a grand magazine from which the powers of mischief could have been diffused so far as the influence of an immense city is known to extend.

I scarcely need to add the trite and obvious truth, that among a large assembly of men, depravity is augmented, not only in the simple proportion of the dispositions of the individuals, but likewise in proportion to the temptations, the facilities, the concealment, the sharpened intellects, the system, and the impunity, afforded by the combination of a multitude of similar dispositions. Probably it is a moderate supposition, that the measure of depravity in London is twice as great as the very same persons could have attained in opposite local circumstances. One thinks, that if it were any part of the business of governments to take care of the morals of a people, they would do everything consistent

with the spirit of freedom to prevent them from accumulating into large cities. But certainly luxury, commerce, and pomp, are considerations of greater moment than the public morals and happiness!

Perhaps one of the first ideas of a total stranger to great cities, on entering London, would be, that such an immense concourse of human beings, so closely contiguous to one another, must make it a very social state. Where almost the very air is warmed with the emanation of human life, where man meets the countenance of his brother every moment; where hundreds of families reside in a line, with only a few bricks between their abodes, and hundreds of others confront them at the distance of a few yards,—he might perhaps imagine a lively and ample circulation of fraternal kindness. Placed in such an intimate vicinity, they will almost have all things in common. What pleasures and pains of sympathy would he not imagine where there are so many to excite and share them? He would soon find with surprise, that this crowded, contiguous state, is the most dissocial of all possible states of human beings. He would find that men are drawn to the mass, and that the mass is drawn together, not by sympathetic, but by selfish affections. It is a large company of strangers, each one of whom is considering how he may make his advantage of the rest, and totally unconcerned about their interests, if his own be successful.

A man walks along, glancing consciously or unconsciously on the countenances of five thousand persons in an hour, most of them deeply interested either on immediate affairs or in the general pursuit of happiness, and feels not the smallest concern respecting any of them. If they were a long row of trees the feeling would be much the same;-and he perceives that he is an object of equal indifference to them. The momentary images of their features and expressions followed by others, all quickly vanish into oblivion. These faces may be seen no more; and it is utterly of no consequence whether they be or not. An orange, for which he has just given twopence, seems a thing of more interest to him than any one of those men that pass him.

If I step into a shop on any trifling business, a few words and civilities are exchanged between me and the person who serves me; we recognize human nature on both sides, and in five minutes after we are nonexistent to each other. I mingle again among men with the same indifference, though surrounded every moment by an incalculable proportion of happiness or misery, elating or lacerating the hearts of persons whom I just recognize as living substances, scarcely worth looking at, as they pass me, and are gone.

The same principle of self-centring estrangement is apparent between families inhabiting adjoining houses, and even sometimes the same house, who are often as remote from each other, in respect of any friendly recognition, as if they inhabited the opposite extremities of a

continent.

How little kindness is felt for human beings as human beings, if they

have no relation to my own advantage. Here, in the very heart and quintessence of the human world, where a thousand habitations of men may be seen at a glance, with doors that might give instant admittance, and tables at which the inhabitants regale,—a forlorn stranger, destitute of money, might faint and famish in the street, before kind-hearted man would notice or assist him; or if some slight relief is given-it is sometimes given-I have seen it given, with a hard insulting air and voice, which would have made me say, with myself, May I see that man no more for ever!

All these things appear to me very disastrous, and very alien from the sentiment which should pervade all human hearts, which is expressed by an ancient poet—“ I am a man, and therefore I regard nothing human as foreign to me." But all this is the natural result of a vast and crowded population. For, in what manner is a kind sympathy to be cultivated? No man's heart contains a reservoir of kindness ample enough to be able to afford a friendly feeling to all and every one of a promiscuous multitude, most of whom are totally unknown to him, and the rest regarded simply as moving figures whose features he has seen before, or are recollected on the slender acquaintance of civility or fashion, or from transactions of business, without any approach to a reciprocation of heart. How is it possible to be affected with an expressly kind sentiment for each one that he meets or sees of such a number? If the multitude were to vanish away all but a very few, his benevolence would find it possible to take some account of them, even though they were strangers; but while the multitude still covers the scene, he can take account of none; the individuals are lost in the mass from which his heart stands aloof. But to be thus surrounded and in contact with human nature, without being able to give the sympathies which in its own right it seems to claim, has a pernicious effect on the heart; it has more than a negative tendency to produce the coldest selfish indifference. A multitude of human beings is thus a cause of being less human, and an apology for it. The claimants being innumerable exempts from the payment of the dues of cordiality to any.

It would be impossible for the spirit of union and sympathy to pervade so huge an aggregate, even if there were no definite principles of repulsion among them. But there are many. The ardent competition which inspirits a large portion of the activity of London, is most destructive of all expansive sympathies. A man sees that many hands are stretched out to seize the advantage which he likewise is anxious to seize, and that no consideration of his necessities, or wishes, or weakness, will induce the smallest forbearance or compromise in the strife, or compassion for his disappointments if he fail. Each one deems that the prize would be his, but for these voracious animals that contest it with him; and if he gain it, the pleasure of securing the good perhaps derives a little additional poignancy from the mortification of his rivals. What must be the effect of such a process, indefinitely repeated, on the

Benevolence with which a man ought to regard his fellow-men, in whose minds too the same process is operating, so that each justifies himself, if he thinks on the subject at all, by the necessity imposed on him by all the rest. Let any one recollect his own feeling, and the feeling apparent in others, when he has been in the midst of a crowd, at the entrance of some frequented public place, each struggling and pushing, himself among the rest, to enter first, for the convenience of accommodation : and he may imagine how much kindly, friendly softness of heart he should be likely to derive from habitually regarding human beings and himself, just as he regarded them then.

Again, the absolute certainty of being surrounded by a multitude of cheats and miscreants, such a number as could exist nowhere but in an immense city, with the difficulty of knowing who they are, or rather who they are not, has a baneful influence on extended kindness in this city. It produces necessarily a reluctance to confide, a quickness to perceive the worse indications of character in a man's manners, a suspicious watchfulness, a promptitude to hostility. It has often struck me, even in passing along the streets, that the defensive and vindictive feelings reside very near the surface; the most trivial incivility would kindle anger; and the sort of half-resentful inquietude may be excited even by an earnest or lingering look. The social decorum is a kind of armed neutrality, and each man carries a ready-written declaration of war in his pocket, to be forthcoming at a moment's warning.

The innumerable precautions by day and night, for the security of habitations and property, indicate what every one thinks of somebody else.

Another cause of the little regard felt by individuals for the mass of humanity in a great city is, that number depreciates value. Human beings are made too vulgar and plentiful to be anything worth. You can find them in multitudes any time, anywhere-are common as swarms of flies on a summer's day, and reduced to nearly the same insignificance, by the marvellous excess of their number (one is inclined to say quantity), and by the trivial importance which each is felt to bear to the whole; which whole, as I have said before, you can bring within no feeling of friendly approximation. The whole is a world, and an individual is but an atom; the one is too vast for your benevolent regard, the other too small.

It would be curious to make a scale of degrees of importance, which human beings may have to each other, according to the degrees of the facility of meeting with them. I would begin with Robinson Crusoe, to whom the appearance of a man was a circumstance of infinite interest; I would advance next to a thinly-scattered population, like that of the back settlements of America, where the infrequent visit of a neighbor, who travels leagues for the interview, must be a welcome surprise; and so forward through the various stages of population till I came to London. What a difference between the feeling of the solitary

islander at the sight of a human countenance, and that with which vou meet or pass any one of the men or women in Fleet Street!

XLIII. TO MISS MARIA SNOOKE.

[On the Metropolis, No. II.]

March 18, 1803.

MY DEAR FRIEND,—It might be said in opposition to these observations that the inhabitants of a great city have their families, their friends, and their acquaintance, forming round each a little sphere in which the sympathetic aflections are cherished, and powerfully operative; and that, not only in a city but in every other place, it is impossible, except in cases of striking distress, to extend these affections beyond this circle with any warmth of individual regard. I allow that everywhere these active sympathies of the heart must be nearly bounded by this circle of exclusion; so far the case is the same in a large and close population, and in a scattered and scanty one. In the one situation and the other, it is equally inevitable for the numbers on the outside of this circle of the affections to be held in comparative disregard. How then is this exclusiveness more contrary and injurious to philanthropy in the one situation than the other?

For one consideration; it appears to me a most unfortunate circumstance for philanthropy, when the disproportion between the number of persons to whom the heart can extend a definite sentiment of kindness, and of those to whom it cannot, is all but infinite, while they are yet all in the immediate neighborhood, and many thousands of them within perpetual observation. Amidst a scanty population, there is some evident proportion of number between these two divisions of human beings; in a very thin population it might be considerable; therefore there is some tolerable proportion between the measure of indifference and the measure of kindness which a man feels for the portion of humanity that is within his view; which portion is to him practically the human race. In feeling a kind concern for a large proportion of the persons within this sphere, he approaches towards general benevolence, and is far removed from feeling a contempt for mankind. If he do not feel a friendly regard for a greater number of men than the inhabitant of a city does, yet a larger proportion of his feelings toward men are kind, because a far smaller number of men are at once seen, and yet consciously excluded from his benevolent concern. In a vast city the number of persons for whom a man can entertain any considerable degree of individual regard, compared to the immense number on the same spot to whom he is indifferent, appears almost nothing; yet this most inconsiderable particle, excepted from the grand assemblage, is placed in opposition to the whole, and monopolizes the exercise of his affections. Thus the innumerable company