They owe me at least this, that I prepared the way for their reception, and that they would have been less popular and more misrepresented, if the outcry which bursts upon the first researches into new directions had not exhausted its noisy vehemence upon me.
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 demoralisation 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! I say not that Law can, or that Law should, reach the Vice as it does the Crime; but I say, that Opinion may be more than the servile shadow of Law.

I impress not here, as in Paul Clifford, a material moral to work its effect on the Journals, at the Hastings, through Constituents, and on Legislation;--I direct myself to a channel less active, more tardy, but as sure--to the Conscience--that reigns elder and superior to all Law, in men's hearts and souls;--I utter boldly and loudly a truth, if not all untold, murmured feebly and falteringly before, sooner or later it will find its way into the judgment and the conduct, and shape out a tribunal which requires not robe or ermine.
Secondly--In this work I have sought to lift the mask from the timid selfishness which too often with us bears the name of Respectability.
Purposely avoiding all attraction that may savour of extravagance, patiently subduing every tone and every hue to the aspect of those whom we meet daily in our thoroughfares, I have shown in Robert Beaufort the man of decorous phrase and bloodless action--the systematic self-server--in whom the world forgive the lack of all that is generous, warm, and noble, in order to respect the passive acquiescence in methodical conventions and hollow forms.