Leaving fops and fogies
A thousand feet below.
T. H.
CHEAP CLOTHES AND NASTY.
King Ryence, says the legend of Prince Arthur, wore a paletot trimmed with
kings' beards. In the first French Revolution (so Carlyle assures us)
there were at Meudon tanneries of human skins. Mammon, at once tyrant and
revolutionary, follows both these noble examples--in a more respectable
way, doubtless, for Mammon hates cruelty; bodily pain is his devil--the
worst evil of which he, in his effeminacy, can conceive. So he shrieks
benevolently when a drunken soldier is flogged; but he trims his
paletots, and adorns his legs, with the flesh of men and the skins of
women, with degradation, pestilence, heathendom, and despair; and then
chuckles self-complacently over the smallness of his tailors' bills.
Hypocrite!--straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! What is flogging,
or hanging, King Ryence's paletot, or the tanneries of Meudon, to the
slavery, starvation, waste of life, year-long imprisonment in dungeons
narrower and fouler than those of the Inquisition, which goes on among
thousands of free English clothes-makers at this day?
"The man is mad," says Mammon, smiling supercilious pity.
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