tens of thousands are ever and anon thrown out of bread. And who does not know that it is impossible to foresee such changes and reversals, which often happen all of a sudden, as if in very spite of the most confident and contrary predictions? Who does not know, that to say that workmen thus flung out of one employment may find it in another, is contrary to the universally admitted principles of the division of labour, and of the distribution of capital? Could the many thousands of silkweavers and throwsters, who, in 1825-6, were reduced to destitution, find support to life by change of place or of employment? Or the many hundreds of thousands of manufacturing labourers in 1826, who looked like ghosts from the grave? Mr M'Culloch might-must have known all this-long before the 1830; yet then it was that for the first time he said, "In the first place it may be observed that, owing to changes of fashion, to the miscalculation of producers and merchants, those engaged in manufacturing employments are necessarily exposed to many vicissitudes; and when their number is so very great, as in this country, it is quite essential that a resource should be provided for their support in periods of adversity."

agoing, time spent in collecting them, time spent in settling how they are to be distributed, and time spent in giving the relief. During all the time made up of these times, multitudes are suffering the pangs of hunger, and all the moral evils-worse than physical incident to such indigence angrily agape for the stinted, and uncertain, and tardy alms. And in what spirit are they given? Too often sullenly-grudgingly-complainingly; and sometimes the supplies, if not exhausted, are stopt at the very point perhaps of salvation; and charity itself cheated out of its blessing and its reward.

Now, whatever may be the effects of poor's laws, good or bad, here are multitudes of honest and hard-working men, with their wives and children, during seasons of frequent recurrence, inevitably deprived of the means of life by the operation of causes inherent in the system of international trade. The poor's laws have nothing to do with the production of such misery; but they have every thing to do with its relief. How else can such poor be saved from starvation? You dare not say that they should support themselves on their savings-and at the same time call yourself a Christian. Will you then-and others like you-and we grant that you are an average human being of the economical class -come forward instantly to provide them with sustentation? No. It is pleasanter to employ your pen than your purse. Yet you, and others such as you, will subscribe-and your subscriptions will be of use-of much use-after time spent in setting them

Is this the best and wisest way to preserve the national character from degradation under the pressure of deep distress? What is this but beggary? But relief given to such sufferers by the law of the land is not alms. We shall not say a syllable here about right. It is the law-and that is enough, under such circumstances surely, to justify the giving and the taking-and to render, too, both effectual for the end which is righteous as the means, and acknowledged to be so by all true English hearts.

Mr Barton is a man of that character-and in his Enquiry into the Causes of the Depreciation of Agricultural Labour, expresses sentiments which never can be obsolete in a Christian land.

"It is to be remembered," says Mr Barton, "that even those who most strongly assert the impolicy and injurious tendency of our poor's laws, admit that causes wholly unconnected with these laws do, at times, depress the condition of the labourer. Poor families are often thrown into a state of severe necessity by long-continued illness or unavoidable misfortunes, from which it would be impossible for them to return to the enjoyment of decent competence, if not supported by extraneous means. It is well known, too, that a general rise in the price of commodities is seldom immediately followed by a rise in the wages of country labour. In the meantime, great suffering must be endured by the whole class of peasantry, if no legislative provision existed for their relief; and when such a rise of prices goes on gradually increasing for a

series of years, as sometimes happens, the suffering resulting from it must be proportionally prolonged. The question at issue is simply this: whether that suffering be calculated to cherish habits of sober and selfdenying prudence, or to generate a spirit of careless desperation?

"During these periods of extraordinary privation, the labourer, if not effectually relieved, would imperceptibly lose that taste for order, decency, and cleanliness, which had been gradually formed and accumulated, in better times, by the insensible operation of habit and example. And no strength of argument, no force of authority, could again instil into the minds of a new generation, growing up under more prosperous circumstances, the sentiments and tastes thus blighted and destroyed by the cold breath of penury. Every return of temporary distress would, therefore, vitiate the feelings and lower the sensibilities of the labouring classes. The little progress of improvement made in happier times would be lost and forgotten. If we ward off a few of the bitterest blasts of calamity, the sacred flame may be kept alive till the tempest be past; but if once extinguished, how hard is the task of rekindling it in minds long inured to degradation and wretchedness!"

We said, a little way back, that no man calling himself a Christian could dare to affirm, that all persons belonging to the labouring classes in England, were in duty bound to lay by, out of their wages, in good or moderate times, enough to support their families in all vicissitudes, without assistance from the State. Mr Sadler illustrates, with his usual eloquence, the gross injustice of such a demand on the working classes, and its gross folly too-seeing the consequences that would inevitably ensue from such doctrine being carried into practice. The wages of labour have a constant tendency to accommodate themselves to the actual average expenses of those rendering it. Therefore, the proposal to the working classes that they should diminish their daily expenditure in order to save money, would only have the effect, if attended to universally, of diminishing the remuneration of their labour precisely in the same pro

portion as they had diminished their comforts-the fact being, that nothing but the spur of necessity occasions the bulk of mankind to labour at all, and they only labour up to their necessity. Nothing, therefore, he truly says, can be less philosophical than the idea of making the whole of the labouring classes hoarders of money; meritorious instances of it do occur, it is true; but they exist only as exceptions; and to render them general, were it possible, would obviously defeat the intended purpose, and derange the whole social system. Take the numbers of the class in question as low as you can, and make the diminution in their daily expenditure as little as is consistent with the plan proposed, and it will be instantly seen, that if this disinterested recommendation could be carried into effect, a single year would throw millions out of employment, and consequently out of bread, and irretrievably ruin the finances of the country.

Mr Sadler deals well with the audacious doctrine of the hard-hearted, that the poor should be compelled so to lay up against a time of sickness or distress, or loss of employment, or, lastly, old age, as not to burden the public; or that they should otherwise be left to their fate. It is indeed shocking to think how people, sitting in easy-chairs at blazing firesides, and tables cover with wine and walnuts, will belch out opinions on the duties of the poor. Sinecurists pensioners sleeping partners in wealthy concerns-fat and nearly fatuous elder sons who have been providentially born to breeches which they never could have bought-are all-so they dream-uncompromising opponents of poor's laws. Buthow stands it with the upper classes-ay, with the rich? Are there no poor's laws for the opulent? "Do any of the political economists," asks Mr Sadler," who make it to the poor, address it to the other and higher orders of society, where its adoption would be far more reasonable, practicable, and just? Have any of the political economists, who have uttered such vehement things against poverty in this particu lar, held forth that the Ministers, the Chancellors, the Judges, and all other

servants of the Crown;-that all public officers, civil, military, or naval;that all Bishops and ministers of the Church, of all orders and degrees; I say, have they proposed, when the health of these fails, or they have advanced far in years, so as to be no longer fully capable of performing the duties of their several callings, that they should at once resign them, and give up their emoluments without any equivalent, half-pay, pension, superannuated allowance, or consideration whatsoever? Yet most of these have private fortunes, many of them ample ones; while the bounty of the country, in the meantime, enables them to put the saving plan into execution, without, in many instances, sacrificing an iota of their personal comforts. But, no: it is held quite proper that many of these should be continued in the enjoyment of their entire incomes till death, and that, under one denomination or another, nearly all the rest should have retiring allowances, amounting, on the whole, few as their numbers comparatively are, to millions. Da prætori; da deinde tribuno, as of old; but that the wretched should receive any thing,that the poor worn-out hind, who has had the misfortune to survive his strength, should have a morsel of the produce of those fields which he has tilled for half a century, or that the cripple who has been maimed in some of the boasted manufactories of the country, should be allowed a few daily pence at the public cost; this is the grievance, according to our political economists!" We have been speaking hitherto chiefly of a legal provision for the poor-not impotent-but thrown out of employment-and we have but touched, as it were, on arguments that of themselves leap up irresistibly to establish the sacred and saving power of such institution, at once merciful and just. We have said little, except by necessary implication, of the impotent poor; and, in truth, when the whole subject is rightly viewed, there is no such distinction. For it has been well said by Mr James Butler Bryan, we believe, and after him by Mr Poulett Scrope, that forty-eight hours of want may reduce the strongest labourer in the prime of life to the

condition of a bed-ridden pauper. Many thousand able-bodied men, willing to work, may thus, in a short time, become feeble wretches, unable to withdraw the point of a pickaxe from the tenacious clay, or to drive it into the hard gravel. But adopting the ordinary distinction, what say you to depriving or withholding from the sick, lame, blind, palsied, aged pauper, all assistance but what voluntary charity shall afford? Certainly these are the very persons whom voluntary contributions will most relieve; and therefore, for them a compulsory provision (as it is called) must, to all who are for abolishing it, be worst of all, because most opposed to the natu ral operation of the best sentiments of the human heart. But here we meet, as might have been expected, with the strangest inconsistencies and contradictions in the creed of charity. Many who will not that the law should afford any relief to people dying of hunger from being thrown out of employment, are afraid to exclude from its protecting care the cripple and the blind; and they approve of that Christian clause in the 43 of Elizabeth, which says, they and others in circumstances equally calamitous shall not be suffered to perish. Others are for excluding even such helpless beings from the protection of a poor's law, but they are well-disposed towards charitable institutions, such as infirmaries, dispensaries, and asylums. There is an essential distinction, they say, between want and disease, and the institutions to relieve them; but they have wofully failed in establishing it. Legal and compulsory provisions for the relief of want, they argue, multiply their objects-those for the relief of disease diminish theirs; taking for granted the very point in dispute! But grant even that it were so, would that be a good Christian reason against relieving want? Here are fifty men, women, and children, dying of want. They are saved from starvation, and ten more are thereby brought on the poor's list, who otherwise might or might not have been able to support themselves? Must we, because that may happen, or does happen, suffer the fifty to shift for themselves, to suffer all the miseries of indigence-because, if

as soon as the act proceeds from a dead letter, not from the spontaneous impulse of the individual. And, in fact, this endeavour to invest the laws with the office of humanity, inconsistent and impracticable as it is, when attempted from the purest motives, does in reality often originate from an imperfect sense of moral obligation, and a low degree of benevolence in men themselves. Absurd as the thought is, when expressed in words, man would be virtuous, be humane, be charitable, by proxy. This, however, not only the divine purpose and the declared end of our being, but common sense itself, forbids. To throw off the care of want, and disease, and misery, upon the magistrate, is to convert humanity into police, and religion into a statute-book."

The sentiments in this passage seem, in the following one, borrowed and translated by Dr Chalmers.

"The error of a Poor's Law consists in its assigning the same treatment to an indeterminate, which is proper only to a determinate virtue. The virtue of humanity ought never to have been legalized, but left to the spontaneous workings of man's own willing and compassionate nature. Justice, with its precise boundary and well-defined rights, is the fit subject for the enactments of the statute-book, but nothing can be more hurtful and heterogeneous than thus to bring the terms or the ministrations of benevolence under the bidding of authority * * *. * could the ministrations of relief have been provided by law and justice, then compassion may have been dispensed with as a superfluous part of the human constitution, whereas the very insertion of such a feeling or tendency within us, is proof in it. self, of a something separate and additional for it to do; of a distinct province in human affairs, within which this fine sensibility of the heart met with its appropriate objects, and by its right acquittal of them, fulfilled the design which nature had in so endowing us. But by this unfortunate transmutation,-this metamorphosis of a thing of love into a thing of law, this invasion of virtue beyond its own proper domain in the field of humanity, nature has been traversed in her arrange

ments, and the office of one human faculty has been awkwardly and mischievously transferred to another."

With all respect due to such emi. nent and excellent men, we demur to such reasonings as these, and venture to deny that there is in our moral nature such a distinction as this between the virtues of Justice and Benevolence—such distinction as this between their respective provinces in the world of active duties. Grant that compassion-sympathy with human sufferings and sorrows-is the principle which provides the ministrations of relief. Even an instinctive and unreasoning sympathy in some measure does so;

"His pity gave e'er charity began," is a line that speaks the experience of every bosom. But a wisely instructed sympathy becomes an almost unimpassioned emotion, if we may venture to use the word in that sense; and is in truth common Feeling, or Sense, or Reason, or Conscience. We know and feel by it that it is right to lighten a brother's burden. Charity is not a mere humaneimpulse, but is thoughtful, and has regard to many contingencies for which it would provide. This "fine sensibility of the heart," strengthened by strong reflection of the mind, meets with its "appropriate objects," not in "one province of human affairs," but in them all-for its spirit is "wide and general as the casing air." The more we know of human affairs, the more sadly are we persuaded that "its appropriate objects" are very numerous, too numerous to be at all times within reach of our individual hands, even though they should be 'open as day to melting charity." But with most of us, engrossed as we are with our own cares, hands are not thus benignantly open-we too often shut them-and, to use a vulgar, perhaps, but strong expression, become close-fisted. Conscious that" our fine sensibility" is exceedingly liable to lose its edge and temper, we do what we can to preserve it unimpaired, either by too frequent use, or by desuetude, and to call in to its aid general rules and maxims. To succour the distressed it is not necessary that we should be under the influence of any very lively

cc