meaning now than when they were first written: "New prisons are built, and new punishments are enacted." Society feels in every part the pressure of the emergency. Millions are given in charity; thousands of poor children are educated in private schools by the benevolence of the good; hundreds of thousands emigrate to America, and the foreign possessions of the empire; waste lands are reclaimed; a stupendous system of domestic industry employs millions of operatives; every expedient that individuals and government can devise is resorted to, but the poor are becoming 66 more numerous, more miserable, and more depraved."

Chartism numbers its million and a half on one single petition to Parliament; trades'unions are more numerous, and the masses are becoming more and more difficult to control.

Many of the middle classes, and a few among the aristocracy, do what they can to remedy the present evils. But what substantial relief

can the starving millions of England experience from the charities of the few?

These charities are often generous; but when government assumes the protection of the people, is it expected that liberal individuals, by extending private aid to a few, can remedy the present evils? A humane and Christian nobleman may employ five hundred of the idle and the poor, who can buy bread with their labour nowhere else, in cutting down a hill to improve his landscape, and feed and clothe them and their wives and children; this is well, for there is more benevolence in giving to the poor labour and its reward, than there is in supporting them in idleness. Some benevolent and rich lady may gather a hundred orphans or indigent children into a charity school; it is noble, and the God of the poor will bless her for it for ever.

Subscription-lists may tell of thousands of pounds raised to feed the needy, in times of scarcity of bread, and of commercial distress; and every town and village may have its charita

ble institution, in some instances patronised by the aristocracy; but what does all this avail, so long as five times the amount thus given to the poor is again wrung from them by a cruel bread-tax, which takes food from their mouths to swell the incomes of the landowners; or by poor-rates, to feed the millions who have been made paupers by this very taxation system?

Show me a man who, in the decline of life, falls upon his parish for support in the workhouse, and I will show you a man who has been compelled to labour half his days to sustain the present system, which has made him a pauper at last-a man who, with the same labour and economy, would have accumulated in America an independent estate, and reared up a beautiful and well-educated family to smooth his down-hill steeps of age, comfort him in sickness, and close his eyes in death's peaceful sleep. There can be no doubt that it costs the poor man five times as much to be a subject of Great Britain, if he lives on this

island, as it would if he were a citizen of the United States.

Is there any benevolence in giving shelter to the broken-down operative to come and die. when his overstrained muscles at length give way? or in answering his cry for bread by telling him to emigrate to America? Is there even JUSTICE in it?

Carlyle, that acute observer, that lover of the right and the true, that hater of shams and wrong, that strange being, "who dares do all that may become a man"-in his "Chartism," observes: "The master of horses, when the summer labour is done, has to feed his horses through the winter. If he said to his horses, 'Quadrupeds, I have no longer work for you, but work exists abundantly over the world; are you ignorant (or must I read you political economy lectures) that the steam-engine always, in the long run, creates additional work? Railways are forming in one quarter of the earth, canals in another; much cartage is wanted somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa,

or America; doubt it not, ye will find cartage; go and seek cartage, and good go with you. They, with protrusive upper lip, snort dubious, signifying that Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, lie somewhat out of their beat; that what cartage may be wanted there, is not too well known to them. They can find no cartage. They gallop distracted along highways, all fenced in to the right and to the left; finally, under pains of hunger, they take to leaping fences, eating foreign property, and— we know the rest. Ah! it is not a joyful mirth; it is sadder than tears, the laugh humanity is forced to at Laissez-faire, applied to poor peasants in a world like our Europe of the year 1839."

No; I am quite disposed to think, that the horse which has worked through his working life, is justly entitled to something to eat when he can work no more. So thinks the slaveholder, who supports his worn-out servants. One would laugh him in the face to hear him talk of the charity of the act. Indeed, in six