Night and Morning

In this Novel of Night and Morning I have had various ends in view -- subordinate, I grant, to the higher and more durable morality which belongs to the Ideal, and instructs us playfully while it interests, in the passions, and through the heart. Fir ... Read more

In this Novel of Night and Morning I have had various ends in view -- subordinate, I grant, to the higher and more durable morality which belongs to the Ideal, and instructs us playfully while it interests, in the passions, and through the heart. First -- to deal fearlessly with that universal unsoundness in social justice which makes distinctions so marked and iniquitous between Vice and Crime -- viz., between the corrupting habits and the violent act -- which scarce touches the former with the lightest twig in the fasces -- which lifts against the latter the edge of the Lictor's axe. Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starveling steal a roll in despair, and Law conducts them to the Prison, for evil commune to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice -- let him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralization of his kind -- and he may be surrounded with the adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee, by that Lackey -- the Modern World! -- EDWARD GEORGE BULWER-LYTTON Less