ness is a guilty conscience, speaking in an intelligible and emphatic way, that we are daily going wrong, and knowingly doing what we ought not to do, and omitting what we ought to do.

CHAPTER VII.

DIGNITY OF LABOUR.-HOW TO REDUCE THE POOR RATES.

The

As it is in the physical, so it is in the spiritual world. For example:-the writer selected a plot of ground the most unpromising that could be met with; every genus of weed flourished most luxuriantly. By rooting up the miscellaneous collection of rubbish, draining, planting, and farming, the wilderness blossomed as the rose. plucking up of vices, and planting virtues in their places, offer themselves to our notice daily. That the harvest reaped has not been proportional to the labours of our philanthropists, has arisen, we humbly think, from not preparing the soil before sowing the seed: hence such barren harvests. De Foe lashes the unproductive ones after the following manner:-"I mean not," says he, "the passive good-for-nothings, who walk starving through the thoroughfare of life, and have no share in the active part of it, leaving no notice to posterity that ever they had been there; but the people who labour, trade, or assist those that trade, enjoy, or aid them that enjoy this life like men, like benefactors to their country, and like Christians assisting futurity by laying up funds of wealth and improvement for posterity, and a posterity instructed to manage

them."* We wonder not at the snatching at every bubble, and the leaning on every reed, that present themselves in the path of those who are deploring their lost health, and with their lost health their departing spirits. Any phantasy that offers, hope comes like an angel of light, and we feel no surprise to see that it is received as a welcome visitant. Therefore it is that St. John Long, and magnetism, and mysticism, and a thousand other isms, have all been hailed as golden promises; that the pretensions of homoeopathy have been admitted, and those of hydropathy now present themselves.

You may read the signs of lost health if you have been

* "The truth is, that unless the wear and tear of life is extraordinary, severe, and unremitting, men rust up faster than they wear up. In this consists the horrible punishment of solitary confinement, with nothing to do. The mind, searching in vain for something to act upon, corrodes itself. It is the practical application of the metaphor of eating one's own heart. Still, there are animal men of a sleepy inert disposition, who are content just to open their eyelids, the window shutters of their soul, and to allow the image of the opposite side of the street, or of any passing stranger, to stream in, as if their eyes and their brain were gifted with no more animation than the lens and the paper of a camera obscura. Nevertheless, in the long run, they are often made to pay dearly for their inhuman sloth and impressionability. As they imitate the life, so they follow the fate and share the destiny of the stalled ox and the fatted pig. Their animal organism does its duty; but their intellectual organism not doing its, the involuntary system of the mammal creature, homo sapiens, gets the mastery of the voluntary; blood and fat triumph over nerve and brain; and the domestic biped is killed by apoplexy, inflammation, or dropsy, as surely as if led to the butchery;-with the difference that the domestic quadruped is useful after its death, whereas he, the do-nothing is, when slaughtered, only an incumbrance and a nuisance, causing considerable trouble and expense to get rid of."- All the Year Round.

indulging in too many of the good things of life, as is the case with a large class of discontented geniuses. Well, take some blue pill and an anti-acid occasionally. The world is perhaps not so much out of course-it's your liver; it's not philosophy-it's bile. Rush vigorously up the highest hill you can find. If you have the misfortune to live in a flat country, get up a tree, or a church tower; have a steeple-chase in circularities, without the risk of dislocating the vertebræ. At any rate, get a higher view of life. Enlarge your mental horizon, and stretch your legs at the same time, whenever the body tyrannises over the spirit, try long-sustained labour. Eschew metaphysics, pro tempore; and be not forgetful of the old Scotchman's definition of it :"When ye dinna ken what the tother says, and tother dinna ken what he means,—that, ye ken, is metapheesics."

May we not hope the period is near, when labour will take its just place and degree amongst the acknowledged elements of happiness, and the business of the world be carried on, not by unthinking, unreasoning, unenjoying machines in human form, but by men worthy of the name; men with minds as capable of labour as their bodies, and having the means and opportunities of exercising the one as well as the other in that earnest but temperate manner which seems to have been ordained as the best plan for man in all his relations. Idleness is the root of all evil, in the various organs, as well as in the whole being; for when these are not healthily employed, each in their own special manner, pain and disorder are certain, sooner or later, to mark their dissatisfaction. It is by these actions

that the proper nervous equilibrium of the system is maintained. Complaints of bad luck are often roundabout shallow apologies for indolence or carelessness.

The flow of all the secretions depends upon the application of their appropriate stimuli. Thus the flow of saliva is promoted by the stimulus of food in the mouth; that of bile by the substances passing through the alimentary canal; that of gastric juice by the presence of blood in the stomach. There is no secretory organ which can possibly remain long active and healthy, unless it receive a due proportion of its appropriate stimulus.

What has industry aided by philosophy done? exclaim the idlers. Let colossal Macaulay reply, who gives cumulative proofs in his life and in his works, in a rich, racy, and ready manner. It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain, extinguished diseases, increased the fertility of the soul; it has given new securities to the mariner, and furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of forms unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up night with the splendour of day; it has extended the range of the human vision; it has accelerated motion, annihilated distance, facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind. These are but a part of its fruits, and of its