Excerpt from Dwellings and Schools for the Poor: From the North American Review for April, 1852

While so many of the foundations upon which men have built their hopes for the advance of the world are crumbling away, the existence of this spirit in literature affords a ground of encouragement which cannot be shaken. But it is, as it were, only the dawning of the day, not the full light of mom ing. The wisdom and the truth which is contained in these books must be turned by other hands into practical action. The books will have been written in vain, the deepest, most earnest thoughts will be worthless, unless we who read them, and are stirred by their power, contrive to gain from them the inducement and the method of personal exertion. There is no one of as who is without ability to do something for those beneath him in the world; and there is no one who, if he neglects this little something, is able to fumish any better plea than that of selfishness; for the excuse of ignorance will not avail.

The books whose titles stand at the head of this article, are illustrations of the amount and character of the thought which is now given to lessening the inequalities in the condi tion of men. But it is not as literary productions that they claim our attention. It is on account of the suggestions which they contain in regard to what may be done to raise the condition and character of the poor, that they chicfly deserve our interest. In America, at this time, any such suggestions are of great, almost preeminent importance. The lower classes here, as in the old world, are the dangerous classes. The danger from them may differ in amount and in development, but it is the same in character. The very blessings of peace and prosperity which we have enjoyed to an unexampled degree, have served even to increase it. They have led os to look at the established order of things as so fixed and stable as hardly to be separated from the course of nature. But this is no time for such a delusion. Even now, there is fear lest the sea of ignorance which lies around os, swollen by the wave of misery and vice which is pouring from revolutionized Europe upon our shores, should overflow the dikes of liberty and justice, and sweep away the most precious of our institutions.

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