year? Is it constant, calculable wages; or fluctuating, incalculable, more or less of the nature of gambling? This secondary circumstance, of quality in wages, is perhaps even more important than the primary one of quantity. Farther, we ask, can the labourer, by thrift and industry, hope to rise to mastership; or is such hope cut off from him? How is he related to his employer; by bonds of friendliness and mutual help; or by hostility, opposition, and chains of mutual necessity alone? In a word, what degree of contentment can a human creature be supposed to enjoy in that position? With hunger preying on him, his contentment is likely to be small! But even with abundance, his discontent, his real misery may be great. The labourer's feelings, his notion of being justly dealt with or unjustly; his wholesome composure, frugality, prosperity in the one case, his acrid unrest, recklessness, gindrinking, and gradual ruin in the other,-how shall figures of arithmetic represent all this? So much is still to be ascertained; much of it by no means easy to ascertain! Till, among the Hill Cooly' and 'Dog-cart' questions, there arise in Parliament and extensively out of it a 'Condition-of-England question,' and quite a new set of inquirers and methods, little of it is likely to be ascertained.

One fact on this subject, a fact which arithmetic is capable of representing, we have often considered would be worth all the rest: Whether the labourer, whatever his wages are, is saving money? Laying up money, he proves that his condition, painful as it may be without and within, is not yet desperate; that he looks forward to a better day coming, and is still resolutely steering towards the same; that all the lights and darknesses of his lot are united under a blessed radiance of hope, the last, first, nay one may say the sole blessedness of man. Is the habit of saving increased and increasing or the contrary? Where the present writer has been able to look with his own eyes, it is decreasing, and in many quarters all but disappearing. Statistic science turns up her Savings-Bank accounts, and answers, "Increasing rapidly." Would that one could believe it! But the Danaides'-sieve character of such statistic reticulated documents is too manifest. A few years ago, in regions where thrift, to one's own knowledge, still was, Savings-Banks were not; the labourer lent his money to some farmer, of capital, or supposed to be of capital, and has too often lost it since; or he bought a cow with it, bought a cottage with it; nay hid it under his thatch: the Savings-Banks books then exhibited mere blank and zero. That they swell yearly now, if such be the fact,

indicates that what thrift exists does gradually resort more and more thither rather than elsewhither; but the question, is thrift increasing? runs through the reticulation, and is as water spilt on the ground, not to be gathered here."

Nor are palliatives any better. No doubt the "new poor law act" was passed with good intent and for a humane end. "England lay in sick discontent writhing powerless on its fever bed, dark, nigh desperate, in wastefulness, wants, improvidence, and eating care, till like Hyperion down the eastern steeps, the Poor Law Commissioners arose and said, let there be work-houses, and bread of affliction, and water of affliction there." But what ignorance, what want of foresight, of true feeling, and of comprehensiveness of view! The act itself is harsh, and narrow, and unchristian; and the only good which it has done; and is doing, arises from this very fact: for all classes are forced to see the evil which it occasions; and thus the attention of all is more or less turned to the consideration of the subject which it sought to embrace. "We will praise the New Poor-Law," says Mr. Carlyle, "farther, as the probable preliminary of some general charge to be taken of the lowest classes by the higher. Any general charge whatsoever, rather than a conflict of charges, varying from parish to parish; the emblem of darkness, of unreadable confusion. Supervisal by the central government, in what spirit soever executed, is supervisal from a centre. By degrees the object will become clearer, as it is at once made thereby universally conspicuous. By degrees true vision of it will become attainable, will be universally attained;. whatsoever order regarding it is just and wise, as grounded on the truth of it, will then be capable of being taken. Let us welcome the New Poor-Law as the harsh beginning of much, the harsh ending of much! Most harsh and barren lies the new ploughers' fallow-field, the crude subsoil all turned up, which never saw the sun; which as yet grows no herb; which has 'out-door relief' for no one. Yet patience: innumerable weeds and corruptions lie safely turned down and extinguished under it; this same crude subsoil is the first step of all true husbandry;. by Heaven's blessing and the skyey influences, fruits that are good and blessed will yet come out of it.

For, in truth, the claim of the poor laborer is something quite other than that 'Statute of the Forty-third of Elizabeth' will ever fulfil for him. Not to be supported by roundsmen systems, by never so liberal parish doles, or lodged in free and easy work-houses when distress overtakes him; not for this,

however in words he may clamour for it; not for this, but for something far different does the heart of him struggle. It is for justice' that he struggles; for just wages,'-not in money alone! An ever-toiling inferior, he would fain (though as yet he knows it not) find for himself a superior that should lovingly and wisely govern: is not that too the 'just wages' of his service done? It is for a manlike place and relation, in this world where he sees himself a man, that he struggles. At bottom may we not say, it is even for this, that guidance and government, which he cannot give himself, which in our so complex world he can no longer do without, might be afforded him? The thing he struggles for is one which no Forty-third of Elizabeth is in any condition to furnish him, to put him on the road towards getting. Let him quit the Forty-third of Elizabeth altogether; and rejoice that the Poor-Law Amendment Act has, even by harsh methods and against his own will, forced him away from it. That was a broken reed to lean on, if there ever was one; and did but run into his lamed right-hand. Let him cast it far from him, that broken reed, and look to quite the opposite point of the heavens for help. His unlamed right-hand, with the cunning industry that lies in it, is not this defined. to be the sceptre of our Planet?' He that can work is a born king of something; is in communion with Nature, is master of a thing or things, is a priest and king of Nature so far. He that can work at nothing is but a usurping king, be his trappings what they may; he is the born slave of all things. Let a man honor his craftmanship, his can-do; and know that his rights of man have no concern at all with the Forty-third of Elizabeth."

And what now is the condition of the working classes of Great Britain? Her land is fertile; her empire mighty; her wealth uncounted; and poets sing and orators declaim of her power and her glory. Can it be that millions of her sons: and daughters lie weltering in debasement and poverty, starving in body and soul, driven about like cattle, uncared for, unsympathised with? Can it be that an empire which boasts that no slave treads her soil; whose ships of war hunt out traders in human flesh, to hang them up as pirates, whose broad mantle covers the black African in his freedom;-tolerates at home a social oppression, which goads poverty in its misery, and wrings the heart of the wretched with unutterable anguish? Can it be that more than half her population are kept untaught-are forced to labor through the livelong year-glad if they and theirs may obtain food enough to keep soul and body together? Alas! poetry here might

image a dark picture, and oratory utter itself in lofty indig nation; for with all her glory and might, Great Britain beholds her working classes in a condition almost without hope; the sires slaves, leaving enslaved sons to fill their place. Mr. Carlyle, after showing how the injustice of England towards Ireland is now beginning to re-act, in bringing over shoals of Irish laborers, who will work for any thing so that they get food enough to live; and so by competition reduce wages, and increase work everywhere, thus speaks of the condition of the working classes:

"But now on the whole, it seems to us, English Statistic Science, may conclude, what every man who will take the statistic spectacles off his nose, and look, may discern in town or country: That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish competing with them in all markets; that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price: at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of third-rate potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to an equality with that. Half a million handloom weavers, working fifteen hours a-day, in perpetual inability to procure thereby enough of the coarsest food; English farm-labourers at nine shillings, and at seven shillings a week; Scotch farm-labourers who, in districts the half of whose husbandry is that of cows, taste no milk, can procure no milk:' all these things are credible to us; several of them are known to us by the best evidence, by eye-sight.

"Another thing, likewise ascertainable on this vast obscure matter, excites a superficial surprise: That it is the best paid workmen who, by Strikes, Trades-unions, Chartism, and the like, complain most. No doubt of it! The best paid workmen are they alone that can so complain! How shall he, the handloom weaver, who in the day that is passing over him, has to find food for the day, strike work? If he strike work, he starves within the week. He is past complaint! The fact, itself, however, is one which, if we consider it, leads into still deeper regions of the malady. Wages, it would appear, are no index of well-being to the working man: without proper wages there can be no well-being: but with them also there may be none. Wages of working men differ greatly in different quarters of this country: according to the researches or the guess of Mr. Symmons, an intelligent humane VOL. VIII.-15

inquirer, they vary in the ratio of not less than three to one. Cotton-spinners, as we learn, are generally well paid, while employed; their wages, one week with another, wives and children all working, amount to sums which, if well laid out were fully adequate to comfortable living. And yet, alas! there seems little question that comfort or reasonable wellbeing is as much a stranger in these households as in any. At the cold hearth of the ever-toiling, ever-hungering weaver, dwells at least some equability, fixation as if in perrenial ice: hope never comes; but also irregular impatience is absent. Of outward things these others have or might have enough; but of all the inward things there is the fatallist lack. Economy does not exist among them; their trade now in plethoric prosperity, anon extenuated into inanition, and short time,' is of the nature of gambling; they live by it like gamblers, now in luxurious superfluity, now in starvation. Black mutinous discontent devours them; simply the miserablest feeling that can inhabit the heart of man. English commerce with its world-wide convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable Proteus Steam-demon, makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a bewilderment; sobriety, steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first blessings of man, are not theirs.

"Be it with reason or with unreason, too surely they do in verity find the time all out of joint; this world for them no home, but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancour, indignation against themselves and against all men. Is it a green flowery world, with azure everlasting sky stretched over it, the work and government of a God; or a murkey-simmering Tophet, of copperas fumes, cottonfuz, gin-riot, wrath and toil, created by a Demon, governed by a Demon? The sum of their wretchedness merited and unmerited welters, huge, dark and baleful, like a Dantean Hell, visible there in the statistics of Gin: Gin justly named the most authentic incarnation of the Infernal Principle in our times, too indisputable an incarnation: Gin the black throat into which wretchedness of every sort, consumating itself by calling on delirium to help it, whirls down; abdication of the power to think or resolve, as too painful now, on the part of men whose lot of all others would require thought and resolution; liquid Madness sold at ten-pence the quartern, all the products of which are and must be, like its origin, mad, miserable, ruinous, and that only! If from this black, unluminous, unheeded Inferno, and Prisonhouse of souls in pain, there do flash up from time to time, some dismal wide-spread glare of Chartism and the like, notable to all,