Ridotto

“ I wish to speak here of the so-called rudeness of reform; and to say that I think we should call this roughness rather than rudeness. A true reformer honors human nature by recognizing in it a higher power than is shown in its average action. ”

“ A new scheme, and an inquisition into the management of the old one, may both successfully go on at the same time; and they who say that they cannot, do but own that they are afraid they should. Are they conscious to themselves, that the directors may hope to escape part of their punishment, by fathering upon others a great share of their guilt, or rather the power of being guilty? ”

“ If you get hit soon after you've done wrong, you think it's retribution, and if it holds off till you've forgotten all about it, you think it's a strange Providence, and you puzzle over it, but you don't reform. ”

“ The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. ”

“ Reformation takes a retrospective glance and begins in restitution and reparation for all previous wrongs and unfaithfulness. It is one of the worst evils of our day that even disciples are so ready to bury the financial and moral debts of their past life in the grave of a too-easy oblivion. ”

“ Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,—a business often of enormous difficulty. ”

“ He well understood that under the Restoration, a period of continual compromises between men, between things, between accomplished facts and other facts looking on the horizon, it was all-important for the ruling powers to have a household drudge. ”

“ And if we would draw you from any ancient rooted error, which can but plead two, or three, or six, or seven hundred years custom, you are as much offended with a motion for reformation as if you were to lose your life by it, and hold fast old errors, while you cry out against new ones. ”

“ This relation to a man's whole capacity for self-management, his "moral," is a distinctive feature, I take it, which separates the treatment required by the destitute or necessitous from anything that can be offered to citizens who are maintaining themselves in a normal course of life." [865]
In this cogent argument for the retention of the Category of the Destitute, and of one Authority, and one Authority only, for all classes of destitute persons, we see two distinct and separate assumptions, one as to fact, and the other as to social expediency. ”

“ Reparation? To you! It is you who can offer me no reparation for the offence against my feelings--and my person; for what reparation can be adequate for your odious and ridiculous plot so scornful in its implication, so humiliating to my pride. No! ”

“ And then, like the restless witches on the barren heath that their breath has blasted, the great reformers rouse themselves again, and looking from the mischief they have done to the still worse that remains behind, they mutter prophetically, "We'll do—we'll do—we'll do!" ”

“ Now, released from restraint, society abandoned the decencies of life and the reverence for law itself, and plunged into excesses more unnatural than had been the restraints of Puritanism. The inevitable effect of excess is disease, and for almost an entire generation following the Restoration, in 1660, England lay sick of a fever. ”

“ And if all restraint is removed, it is as certain as fate that their condition will be far worse than it ever was before. It will be the old system, with all its mitigations rescinded and all its horrors intensified. ”

“ Here was the Fault transferr'd to the Office, which is a Dangerous Error; for not only Government, but Human Society it self may be dissolved by the same Argument, if the Frailties or Corruptions of Particular Men shall be Reveng'd upon the whole. ”

“ No improper channel of expense, public or private, domestic or personal, is glanced at; nothing is objected to in his establishment; no item is recommended to be abolished or curtailed; no change of conduct is hinted at as desirable. And yet subsequent writers speak with one accord of his reformation; "and reformation implies previous errors." ”

“ Without passing a more definite judgment on those who invented and profited by this scheme, it may be said that there has scarcely been a century which has produced one more mysterious, more daring, better arranged, and resulting in an oppression so enduring, so sure, so cruel. ”

“ But with the most efficient system of reformation which human wisdom could devise, there would still be a large contingent of incorrigible offenders, who, from hereditary taint, bad environment, or other causes, have cut themselves off from all retreat, burned the bridges behind them, and enlisted in a life warfare against human society and law. ”

“ If an institution were discovered to have the slightest defect in principle, or to have degenerated a little in practice, their first step was to abolish it entirely, and leave the replacing it for the present to chance, and for the future to their successors. ”

“ Arrived at this agreeable asylum, to which I have travelled so far in search of repose, I ought to find it in a retired, convenient, and pleasant habitation; the master of which, a man of understanding and worth, spares for nothing to render it agreeable to me. But what repose can be tasted in life, when the heart is agitated? ”

“ Out of ten thousand conflicting spurs of action comes, in the snapping of a finger, a sinister unity of purpose, which knows not the individual brain that conceived it, nor the logic of its action. Ten thousand clods, jumbled in confusion, are instantly turned into a single straight furrow. ”

“ Reform is born of need, not pity. ”

“ When I put my name to the production, which has occasioned this correspondence, I became responsible to all whom it might concern,—to explain where it requires explanation, and, where insufficiently, or too sufficiently explicit, at all events to satisfy. My situation leaves me no choice; it rests with the injured and the angry to obtain reparation in their own way. ”

“ A quiet hint to Conservatives.—That which we did not know formerly, and know now, or might know if we chose,—is the fact that a retrograde formation, a reversion in any sense or degree, is absolutely impossible. ”

“ This is the source of the erroneous excesses of Remorse and Revenge; the one extending itself over the future, and the other over the past; provinces in which their suggestions can only be the sources of evil. The purpose of a resolution to act more wisely and virtuously in future, and the sense of a necessity of caution in repressing an enemy, are the sources from which the enormous superstitions implied in the words cited have arisen. ”

“ Your own change is quite sufficient—it gives us all we need. It will give us, if we retrace the steps of it, everything, everything!"
Mrs. Briss considered. "I don't quite see, do I? why, at this hour of the night, we should begin to retrace steps." ”

“ But deduction, starting from a premise about all the members of a class, compels a conclusion about every and each of necessity. One border-war may be similar to another, and the whole number may be similar, without being similarly evil; but if all alike are evil, each is evil of necessity. ”

“ Our nature being at all times essentially the same, I presume that after a certain period of ferociousness and horrors, a resettlement of some sort, probably of the most despotic governments, would have taken place. ”

“ It is beyond prediction what the consequences may be, of uncertainty, or hardship, of injustice in deprivation of rights, in windfalls of right to others, in laying on new and wholly unexpected liabilities and in relieving from anticipated ones, if retroactive administrative refashioning becomes the general practice. ”

“ Now, reforms move slowly, and by the time these reforms come about, the people whom they would have made happy, and who fussed and encountered dislike and satire and snubbing, and burning and boiling in oil, and suchlike discouragements, for the sake of them, were dead and buried and mere sanitary problems. The new people had new and quite different needs, and the reforms for which their fathers fought and died more or less uncomfortably, and got into debt with the printers, so soon as there were printers to get into debt with, were about as welcome as belated dinner guests. ”

“ When disposition, like a sail unfurled,
Shews all its rents and patches to the world.
Disposition however is the one thing which undergoes no other change than that of growth in after life. The physical constitution, when any morbid principle is innate in it, rarely alters ”

“ When you are destitute of all resources—when adversity or a too generous heart shall have deprived you of all means of subsistence—and when your own exertions fail to supply your wants, open the enclosed letter. ”

“ But, even as the term "commutation" has passed from such like things to those actions and passions which confer reverence or injury, harm or profit on another person, so too the term "restitution" is applied, to things which though they be transitory in reality, yet remain in their effect; whether this touch his body, as when the body is hurt by being struck, or his reputation, as when a man remains defamed or dishonored by injurious words. ”

“ This yoke was broken, and the bars burst in sunder by the strong hand of the people, and by the operations of a resentment which discovered more than the imaginary reactions of nature, among the inhabitants of a vast domain. ”

“ The new scenes and occupations in which they are suddenly and abruptly placed, like the transplanting of a tree, make them pine and suffer for a time, until restraint becomes a habit, and in both body and mind the convict becomes a new man. ”

“ Reproof, and either reform or rebellion, became necessary everywhere. The northern Reformers, Holbein, and Luther, and Henry, and Cromwell, set themselves to their task rudely, and, it might seem, carried it through. The southern Reformers, Dante, and Savonarola, and Botticelli, set hand to their task reverently, and, it seemed, did not by any means carry it through. ”

“ The less wonder if I call reformation like a refiner's fire. The dross of a church is not purged away without this violence of fire.
This is the manner of reformation held forth in Scripture, and that in reference, 1. To magistrates and statesmen; 2. To ministers; 3. To a people reformed; 4. To a people not reformed.
In reference to magistrates and statesmen, reformation is a fire that purgeth away the dross: Isa. i. 25, “And I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin.” Here is the refiner's fire ”

“ Such serious contradictions and incongruities lead us forcibly to the conclusion that we have a state of transition before us, an institution that is in some degree distorted and warped from its original shape. ”

“ As we progress in the reform, as we confess our faults and make restitution to those we have wronged, asking pardon of those we have offended, the opposition of the devil will proportionally increase, and his power be manifested in a greater degree ”

“ Since it is all such a dismal failure, why not plan a better way? Why not begin at the other end of the line to keep offenders apart? Why herd them—good, bad, and indifferent—together, in the stage of their career when there is hope for some, at least, to reform ”

“ There are those who would be overcautious, who believe in the policy enunciated by the proverb: “Never mention a rope in the home of a man that has been hanged.” Had this principle at all times been adhered to, reforms would have been few. ”

“ The political incident of the deposition is sketched with extraordinary knowledge of the world;—the ebb of fortune, on the one hand, and on the other, the swelling tide, which carries every thing along with it. ”

“ As to reformation, I have no great belief in it, when the ordinary class of culprits, who are vicious from ignorance or habit, are the subjects of the experiment. "A shave from a broken loaf" is thought as little of by the male set of delinquents as by the fair frail. ”

“ The retreat was in consequence determined on, to the great glee of our men, who were tired of inaction, and imagined they should feel their sovereign's sufferings less if engaged hand to hand with, the foe, in his service, than watching him as they had lately done, and dreading yet greater evils. ”

“ And part of this inability arose from their curious fear of the past. Most movements of reform have looked to the past for great part of their inspiration. To reform means to shape anew, and he pointed out that every revolution involves the idea of a return. ”

“ They therefore welcome hardness of heart, obstinacy, and recklessness of disposition as an actual means of escape from thoughts which would, under favourable circumstances, lead to moral amendment and reformation. ”