Fate of the Cavaliers.

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was one of a memorable order, waged, not to oppose the ambition of kings, but to vindicate the pristine rights of human nature-a conflict between the ferocious demands of an organized minority, leagued together not merely for the acquisition of substantial empire over the fortunes and actions of the people, but for the extinction of the freedom of human thought, and the stern opposition of the other party, which took its stand behind established and traditionary compacts, and the natural rights of mankind. The mind prostrates itself, in the contemplation of this scene, before the awful divinity of suffering, and worships, with unaffected awe, the despair of a whole people. It was strange, indeed, to see an ancient kingdom, civilized for a thousand years, passing into a state of worse than pristine barbarism, covered with beggars, scourged by famine, its fields left uncultivated, and hundreds escaping to a new world, to found there a new empire.

And all this was done by "the Scottish Cavaliers." And what were they? A faction against their king, when they were not his slaves-the dirt under his feet, or the poniard in his heart. Try them by their actions or their motives; analyze their greatness and their littleness, their glory and their shame, their position, their triumphs and misfortunes, their failures and their vices, and how many true heroes, noble spirits, worthy of immortality, will stand the winnowing! Turn the fanners, and how many are blown away as chaff! how many are remembered only to be execrated by every honest heart! And yet-let them sleep in peace in their bloody graves-they are not so bad as the writer who can find a subject for ribald jeers in the dying agonies of martyred Covenanters, who, taken all in all, will ever stand in history as the glorious impersonation of a mighty struggle—the incarnation of a heroic nationality, and a generous cause.

ART. II.-1. The Westminster Review for 1828, and The London Review for 1829.

2. Poor-Law, Factory, Constabulary, and various Sanitary Reports, from 1833 to 1850.

No public man of the present day is more justly an object of general attention and interest than Mr. Edwin Chadwick. He is the type of a remarkable class of men, the specimens of which have at no time been numerous. To him, more properly than to most of his contemporaries, may be applied the name of Reformer; for it would be difficult to mention another public man possessing so pre-eminently the passion and the genius for rectification. His walk, however, is peculiar; and the vague name of Reformer would by no means describe it. In the first place, Mr. Chadwick is not specially what would be called a Political Reformer; that is, whatever may be his political views and connexions, it is not to political discussions that his instinct leads him-the questions of suffrage and the abstract rights of the people in the matter of government, are not the questions that particularly interest him. Neither, again, is he a Social Reformer after the Parisian school. It is not with general theories of human society that he occupies himself; and ample as his qualifications are for pronouncing opinions on such schemes as those of Louis Blanc and Fourier, it is not as a critic of such schemes that he has cared to distinguish himself. Finally, it is not among the intellectual or spiritual Reformers of our time that Mr. Chadwick has his place. A decided advocate as he is of popular education, nay, having furnished perhaps more terrible demonstrations of the necessity of popular education than any man living, he touches such questions only in as far as they are adjacent to and lie around the special field of his own researches. That field is the field of material reforms. It is with what are called the material interests of our country that Mr. Chadwick chiefly concerns himself. That-given on the one hand, the existing British island with its existing capabilities, and, on the other hand, the existing British population, with its existing habits and tendencies, and its existing means of improving thoselabour should be expended upon the object of bringing these two things into closer and more perfect adaptation, the one to the other, so as to produce a greater amount of national health, wealth, comfort, and longevity, than has yet been seen among us such, somewhat abstractly stated, is the sum of Mr. Chadwick's views and endeavours. His specific walk may, therefore,

Early Occupations and Writings.

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be said to be that of Administrative or Practical, as distinct from Organic or Theoretical Reform. Of the names that occur to us as distinguished for the same kind of talent as that for which Mr. Chadwick is known amongst ourselves, the most illustrious are those of Turgot and Count Rumford. Seeing, now, that it is towards men of this stamp that society must naturally be looking in these days of revolution, as towards gauges of what is sound and applicable amid wholesale seas of theory, we cannot, as we conceive, do our readers a greater service than by presenting them with a succinct sketch of the life and labours of the eminent public servant whose name we have thus introduced to them.

Mr. Chadwick is a Lancashire man, having been born, we believe in 1801, in the immediate vicinity of Manchester. Of the true manufacturing stock that constitutes the staple of the population of Lancashire, he came to London early, and there he received the greater part of his education. Having chosen the law for his profession, he was enrolled as a student of the Inner Temple in his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year. During the period of his legal studies he maintained, like many other law-students then and now, an incidental connexion with the newspaper press; and it was then, and partly in this capacity, that he first directed his attention to the class of subjects that he has since made peculiarly his own. Having among his acquaintances many medical students, as well as persons engaged in mercantile pursuits, he acquired a greater amount of miscellaneous knowledge than usually falls to the share of a young man preparing for the Bar; and carrying, as he did, into the midst of this knowledge, a decided statistical bent, and a decided spirit of improvement, it was not long before he settled with himself certain conclusions of a general nature, affecting important social interests, and yet continually traversed in the ordinary routine of social procedure. Accordingly his first public writing, a paper on "Life-Assurance," in the Westminster Review for April 1828, was an uncompromising attack on an established

abuse.

During the years 1824-27, a good deal of public attention was expended on the subject of Benefit or Friendly Societies. Two Parliamentary Reports were issued on the subject, the one in 1825, the other in 1827. In the course of the investigations that preceded these reports, the sufficiency of the Tables then in use for the insurance of life by most Insurance Companies was called in question. These Tables, known by the name of the Northampton Tables, had been drawn up by the celebrated mathematician Dr. Price, from data furnished by the burial registers of the parish of All Saints, Northampton, from the year 1735

to 1780 inclusive. Now, it was contended by many eminent statisticians that, however accurately these Tables had been prepared, yet, founded as they were on data so purely local, and referring as they did to so remote a period, they had necessarily ceased to be trustworthy. From a comparison of them with one or two other sets of Tables that had been prepared subse quently from other data, as well as from certain theoretical considerations that seemed to indicate that the value of life had increased in this country since the latter half of the last century, it was shrewdly suspected by the statisticians in question that the Northampton Tables represented the probabilities of life, particularly in the middle and higher classes, and in those classes particularly at the earlier and middle periods of life, at too low a figure; and consequently that the public at large were paying too dear for their insurances, and the Insurance Companies reaping very exorbitant profits. Thus, according to the Northampton Tables, the probable duration of a life already at twenty, was 33.43 years, that of a life at thirty was 28.27 years, and that of a life at forty was 23.08 years; whereas, according to calculations founded on the experience of the very companies that were using these Tables, the probable durations of three such lives were 41.05 years, 33.97 years, and 27.39 years respectively. Nor were the Insurance Companies quite ignorant of this suspected conflict between their experience and their principles, for it was a notorious fact that companies that had grown rich by the use of the old tables in the operation of insuring lives, would not use these Tables in the converse operation of granting annuities. Thus, if the same man who, insuring his life at twenty, had to pay as if he had but 33.43 years to live, had wished to purchase a life-annuity, he would have found the probable duration of his life in the company's estimation suddenly extended, and the balance doubtless set down to the notion that all annuitants live long. And here the private companies were wiser than the Government. In the sale of Government annuities the Northampton Tables were acted on. Hence, were it true that these Tables were no longer accurate, there arose the startling inference, that in the sale of Government annuities there was a constant waste of public money. Mr. Finlaison, the actuary of the National Debt Office, had repeatedly urged this fact on the notice of the Government, and had even submitted a calculation by which it appeared that, in the month of April 1827, the loss to the Sinking Fund, arising from this very discrepancy between the presumed and the actual rate of mortality among Government annuitants, amounted to £8000 a-week. Authorities, however, were not wanting on the other side. Mr. W. Morgan, for example, actuary to the Equitable

Paper on "Life Insurance."

43

Society, the wealthiest and most extensive institution of the kind in Europe, maintained, both through the press and in evidence before the Committee on Friendly Societies, that Dr. Price's Tables still held good, and that there was no reason for altering them. This opinion, which Mr. Morgan advanced on the strength of his experience in the Equitable, was backed by other practical men, particularly by Mr. W. Glenny, secretary to numerous Benefit Societies, and Mr. W. Frend, actuary to the Rock Life Insurance Company.

It was to the question thus stirred that Mr. Chadwick addressed himself in the paper in the Westminster. Adopting the affirmative view of the question, namely, that the Northampton Tables did represent the probabilities of life in this country at too low a figure, he supported this view by a mass of facts and reasonings such as had hardly been accumulated on the point before. The chief value of the article, however, consisted in the thorough and explicit assertion that it made of the abstract principle that lay at the bottom of the whole controversy to wit, that the duration of life at any locality being determined by the surrounding circumstances, and civilisation having, on the whole, a tendency to diminish the activity of such circumstances as are noxious, human life must, on the whole, in any progressive community, exhibit a tendency to increase in value. This important proposition, which had become clear to Mr. Chadwick during his previous studies, and especially in the course of his conferences with his Aberdeenshire friend, the well-known Dr. James Mitchell, was verified in the paper by a variety of considerations all supporting its a priori likelihood. Casting a glance, for example, over the period that had elapsed since the preparation of the Northampton Tables, Mr. Chadwick enumerated various special causes that had begun to operate during that period; which causes must, according to all medical and popular experience, have contributed to lengthen life. Such causes were vaccination, the diminution of the ancestral vice of hard drinking, the institution of savings' banks, the increase of habits of cleanliness, the improvement of medical science, the better construction of streets and houses, &c. In corroboration of the same truth, Mr. Chadwick appealed to the experience of foreign countries; and especially to that of France, as follows:

6

"According to a document which the men of science in France treat as satisfactory evidence, it appears that the annual deaths in Paris during the Age of Chivalry,' (the fourteenth century,) was one in sixteen or seventeen. During the seventeenth century it was one in twenty-five or twenty-six; and in 1824, it was one in 32.62. When the other parts of France were added to the capital, the pro