The Night Side of London by James Ewing Ritchie

This is a comic age in which we live. We are overdone with funny writers. The ghastliest attempts at liveliness surround us on every side. I would not bring back the grave deportment and stately etiquette of days gone by, nor could I if I would. But are we not running to another extreme? Is there not a lack of reverence and dignity? If we train up our youth to comic Blackstones, and teach them to extract fun out of the grandest history done in modern Europe -- the history of the Anglo-Saxon race -- of the race that has founded civil and religious liberty, and still nurses it in the face of a frowning continent, what can we expect? Men are what we make them. "Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined. " A feeble and contemptible father is succeeded by a feeble and contemptible son. Have no grand creed of your own to make your daily path lustrous with the light of heaven. Crack your weak jest and pun at all men have reverenced. Learn from _Punch_ to titter, no matter the theme. And can you wonder that your son believes not in man's honour or woman's love -- in God or the devil, but solely in the Holborn Casino and Cremorne? For instance, is not law one of the most wonderful achievements of civilisation? I do not go so far as "the judicious Hooker. " I do not say with him that her seat is the throne of God, her voice the harmony of the universe, but is it not wonderful to think of the complex arrangements of which the judge seated in his robes on the bench, administering law, is the outward sign. In the first place, man must have learnt to give up a primary instinct of his nature -- that of self-revenge.

Then the central power in the darkest parts of the land must have become dominant. What ages must have past before law dared meddle with privilege, or before its administrators could realize the fact of the sanctity of the individual man, whether he starved in a garret or feasted in a palace. And when the judges went on circuit, with the gorgeous cavalcade of the olden time, what terror was struck into the hearts of the rustics, and how patent became to them the strength and dignity of law. Now why burlesque this? The idea is good and true, yet the burlesque is permitted and exists, aye, even to this day.