with her uplifted finger, and boldly show the path to the restingplace of sorrow.

There are few men who do not consider consolation as a necessary appendage to friendship, a worldly humanised virtue, which, like charity, may be called into action, or omitted altogether, as it best suits the inclination. Let one man say to another, "I have lost all that I possessed in the world. My pilgrimage must begin again." Ere the friend reply, let him draw aside the veil of outward feeling, and search his heart. He is grieved; perhaps not deeply, but vexatiously. His friend may have had the opportunity of placing within his reach the higher pleasures of society, and his hospitality has robbed him of many dull and languid hours; but now his table can no longer be spread for his enjoyment; there are few among his old associates who will not shrink from an intimacy with a man of fallen fortunes. Does not he even feel a strange reluctance, a secret chill, a presentiment of embarrassment, and estrangement as he grasps his hand? It is byplay of every day acting, though he may feel how unworthy the character is that he assumes; but if, without one selfish glance of retrospection, one careful inquiry into the dark future, he can take that friend's hand within his own, and can say to him, honestly and truly, "Hope for better things; it is an ordeal which will show more clearly your faith and energy: God speed you on your way!"-then the spirit that is tried meets his gratefully and confidingly, and his words are remembered for a life-time.

How many well-meaning persons appear to have a scent for the grief-stricken! They hasten to pour upon them their treasured maxims with the dignity of a philosopher. It is seldom that these conventional consolers remember, that it is not every degree of grief that consolation can approach: it may bend over the brink of the well, but it cannot reach the water; for until

the ear of the sufferer is closed to the voice that gives it utterance. There is a patronage too about this species of consolation. They would do well to recollect that, in its contact with the world, the spirit is bruised but not broken. Grief, privation, or misconstruction may bend it for a while, but they will not tie down its indomitable nature: a hasty touch may uncoil the spring, and its elasticity will be restored.

Reader, in the heavy hour that calls to you to administer consolation, remember this: he that requires your succour is your comrade in the combat with trial and sorrow-stronger enemies than cuirass ever shielded in days of old. His lips are parched with thirst; he asks you not for water, yet there is a mute petition in his eye that shall not pass unanswered. For the sake of the brother who shared your cup in childhood, stretch forth your gourd to his lips. Time has witnessed faithfully that we never yet robbed ourselves in giving aid to another whose need was true. Speak to him, then, in faith, in hope, in truth; and the feelings which these words embody so feebly, shall be renewed a hundredfold. A. P.

OUR CITIES OF THE PLAGUE.

It will sometimes happen that a strong man, sound in every portion of his frame, except only in one small spot of one vital organ, is prostrated by the disease of that one spot, racked with pain, wasted with sickness, and his whole existence embittered.

So it will sometimes happen in a state. Some one vital portion, neglected and deranged, will poison and thwart the action of all the rest, and render null and void the best efforts of legislation.

"How can we hope! what can be expected! To what end are our struggles!" So say our philanthropists and patriots. "Reforms are won; the schoolmaster is abroad; grand discoveries are made in science; we have cheap literature and cheap bread; food for the mind, food for the body. To what end is it all? Crime increases; pauperism increases; a sickly population multiplies. Twenty-five millions yearly are spent on gin. Nearly as much more on tobacco and beer. The people-the masses― are no better off than before the Reform Bill was passed. The upper classes are weighed down with rates and taxes. It is all in vain."

Did any man or any set of men ever try to originate great thoughts, or pursue an energetic course of action, while suffering under some wasting and enervating disease; and while, at the same time, surrounded by dirt, noise, confusing numbers, without privacy, comfort, or quiet? If such an attempt was ever made,

it was never successful. Under these influences the guiding mind would be deadened, the spirit could not aspire, the languid frame would sink listless.

But this case, supposed for one man or a few men, is now and has been for ages the condition of the great bulk of the people. That, under their circumstances, so many men of intellect and power belong to their class, and have stepped out from it; and that so many who remain among them are sound thinkers and energetic doers, is wonderful. To use a Scripture expression, we may say of them, "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint." They are crowded into narrow precincts; pent up amid noise, confusion, and dirt. The light of heaven is obscured in their narrow dwellings; the free air is poisoned by noxious exhalations. They become old twenty years before their time. They die at a period that measures scarcely half that of their wealthy brothers.

"We see

"How can this be?" inquires the casual observer. your great towns, your rows of buildings, your scores of streets, your miles of suburbs. Your people must be well lodged, well circumstanced. Here are undeniable evidences of it."

It is scarcely possible to realise the facts under these appearances, but it is no less certain. These are the habitations of other classes, but none of them are appropriated to the people. The swarming multitudes who man the ships, and work in the wharfs, and toil in the workshops and the factories, who lay the railroads, and build the houses, and cultivate the ground-they who are emphatically called the millions, because they so greatly outnumber the other classes, inhabit none of these localities you have observed. The smallest, the least convenient of these, would afford room and appliances for four families belonging to the labouring class. Such a house as is required for one man of moderate influence contains space enough for twenty of them, and more comforts and conveniences than are shared among twenty. They live, thus crowded together, in lanes wedged in between the streets that you traverse; in bye places and waste corners; in alleys without thoroughfares; in courts, the entrances to which you pass without seeing them. And these places, which, because they are thus crowded with life, are (for this is the condition of our being) replete with refuse matter of the most offensive kind, are without any of the contrivances which civilisation has applied to the clearing away of these disgusting conditions of life. Instead

of a tenfold supply of water to wash them away, there is none; instead of a tenfold supply of air for so many human beings, there is none that is not vitiated. All that is impure is retained there, in those bubbling, reeking poison-pits, called cesspools, or slowly crawls out along open gutters. The men who have worked hard all day, and go homewards to such places as these, stop by the way too many of them—at the gin-palaces blazing with light, and before they enter their wretched homes, where their pale wives and sickly children are waiting for them, are besotted, or their blood fevered, and after a short period their bodies sink the easier, by reaction, under the infection of typhus or some other deadly disease, and their families become paupers. What can such men do? How can they improve or advance? For them civilisation has done nothing. For them science and art have never been applied to the domestic comforts of life. The rushes on the floor, which our warm carpets have supplanted, would still be luxury to them. For want of leisure and peace, they know nothing of the discoveries of science, nor the creations of genius. For them there has been no Newton, and no Shakspeare. Nay, as recent investigations too fully proved, to many of them Christ has never spoken His words of love and power. Their children, in many instances, it was found, had never heard His name.

The better state, the improved condition of the upper classes with which this is all compared, is itself a very imperfect one, in all relating to the laws of health; so much so, that the duration of life is, even under the best circumstances, shortened beyond what we can probably imagine at present. Even the Queen's palace is surrounded with malaria; and under the widest and grandest streets, there is collected, by the erroneous form of the sewers and the want of water, a noisome stream, generating poison, which escapes through the gratings by the pavement, and enters through the drains into the houses.* The consequences are the nearly universal dyspepsia, the manifold diseases of children, and the occasional epidemics which alarm the whole population. To the latter inflictions, doubtless, the occasional escape of poisonous exhalations from the crowded localities of the poor contribute. For all these inflictions, the family physician is called in, medicines and diet are ordered, and change of air, or a visit to the sea-side, prescribed.

* So the last report of the Sanitary Commissioners tells us. NO. XXXVII.-VOL. VII.

G

But observe the consequences to the working man. In walking along some thoroughfare, you may occasionally observe in an open workshop, a man at some mechanical operation--perhaps, a turner at his lathe. You are attracted by his clever mode of finishing up his work, and stand looking on. You are sorry to see him so pale and listless in appearance. Presently, you have a sensation of sickness, and become conscious of a disgusting odour which proceeds from a gully-hole just behind. You hurry off, perhaps visiting a chemist's by the way, to banish your nausea by some stimulant. But what becomes of the workman? After his day's monotonous occupation, during which he constantly breathes the noisome stench which drove you away, he sets off to go home to something still worse, still more poisonous. If he too feels a stimulant necessary to excite his sickened stomach, and if he becomes a gin drinker, can you wonder? For him there can be no dieting, no course of medicine, nor the sea-side for his family. A month after, you pass that way and do not see him. He is in his grave-in the corner of the churchyard appropriated to paupers, and his widow and children are in the Union Workhouse. What heart, what time, what capacity could that man, or such as he, have, to take advantage of the opening opportunities of the age? With what reason can you expect, that while such things last, crime, or pauperism, or drunkenness, will diminish.

It is because we feel that the want of efficient sanitary arrangements is at the foundation of these great evils of our population, that we look upon the measures which are about to be introduced as the beginning of a reform, the consequences of which will be great beyond calculation, and that we watch the proceedings of Government on this subject with anxious interest. They have begun firmly and well. Let every well-wisher to his country strengthen their hands to go on well; to introduce a good measure, and to appoint the right men to carry it into operation. The men, whose unwearied labours of more than ten years have at length succeeded in fixing the Legislature to this work, deserve the lasting gratitude of their country, and will be remembered with honour and reverence in generations to come. When Dr. Southwood Smith, standing outside the doors of the houses, because within the air was dangerous to breathe, wrote down on the spot literal descriptions of what he saw in Lamb's Fields and the courts and lanes of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, and thus improved to the utmost the opportunity which Mr. Chadwick (in the Poor-Law