In this Institution labour will be aided, rather than superseded or depreciated: all employment will become subservient to moral and religious improvement; and the Clergyman, Directors, and Committee of Management will act as the Christian advisers and friends of the families in all that regards their eternal and temporal interests.

The Clergyman to be nominated by the Directors for the approval of the Bishop of the Diocese in which the Institution shall be established.

No advances will be required until the whole of the shares are taken, or such portion of them as appears sufficient to warrant a commencement of the undertaking, when a general meeting of the Shareholders will be convened for the purpose of electing a Committee.

The note in the Prospectus regarding the productive power of land under Spade or improved cultivation, has been sometimes questioned; it refers, however, to undoubted authorities, and we now add a paragraph from a respectable journal of November, 1843, describing a much larger profit:

"EXTRAORDINARY PRODUCE.-On three and one quarter acres, on Chat Moss, near Manchester, and only reclaimed some three or four years ago, there have been

F

dug up this season 595 loads of potatoes of 252 pounds each load, equal to 67 tons, and worth fully £2 14s. per ton. The weight of the crop appears to have been within a few pounds of 68 tons, and, at the price stated, would yield upwards of £183, or more than £56 per

acre."

By following the course dictated by Religion, not only will the more truly valuable and enduring advantages of society be realised, but more of wealth, commonly so called, will be created (including the productions of genius, of philosophy, and the fine arts), as a consequence, than under a system in which it is made an exclusive object.

To illustrate the foregoing position, we will contrast the present with the proposed mode of employing about three hundred families, and their general condition.

At present the 1,200 persons flock to a newlyerected cotton mill, in the neighbourhood of which no convenient dwellings may be found; compelled to pay exorbitant rent for damp cellars and dreary garrets, unhealthy and dilapidated, they are scattered about without either schools for their children or places of worship. Among their number would be found the average proportion of superior native skill and talent, which, if properly developed, would enable each possessor to earn

several guineas per week; but all are reduced to nearly one common and miserable rate of wages, not exceeding that which would be paid to an idiot, who could attend to some mechanical operation. Occasionally work, through badness of trade, is long suspended, or the establishment may altogether fail; all parties are disappointed and again dispersed; the employer is defeated in his only object, that of pecuniary gain, and the employed not only continue destitute of intellectual, moral, and religious culture, but are deprived of the small pittance which barely sustained life. If their superior talents lie for ever buried, their ordinary powers as workmen are deteriorated or wasted through excessive toil or improvident habits, and society incurs a still further loss in the necessity for constabulary force and prisons, induced by the neglect of one of the most imperative of its Christian duties, a regard for the condition of the people.

In the Self-supporting Institution, having for its end and primary object the moral and religious training of the people, Christianity will be always in the ascendant, directing, and incorporated with, all the proceedings. The people will not be permitted to wander about the country in search of the bread that perisheth, willing to work but unable to find employment. Constant occupation will be

regarded as indispensably necessary to their wellbeing and improvement. Great or peculiar talents, recognised as a gift of Providence for the good of society at large, will be aided and exercised accordingly.

The general principles, and their results in practice, were illustrated on the following occasion:

The Author, having been requested by a member of the Government at Rome to explain the difference between the principle of the Self-supporting Villages, or Christian Colonies, and that of the Institutions of society in general throughout Europe, presented, on the 16th of April, 1847, the subjoined paper, which was laid before the Pope, and also before the Agricultural Commision, presided over by Cardinal Massimo. It is now reprinted, in the hope that other Religious Denominations may be induced to issue Proposals for establishing, for such families of their respective Congregations as may require them, Institutions similar to the Church of England Self-supporting Village," in which it is intended that all secular affairs should be subordinated to, and in harmony with, those important duties of individuals and of Societies enjoined by Religion, and so eminently conducive to general improvement and happiness.

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“That which peculiarly distinguishes the proposed Christian colony from the constitution of society in

general, is the power which it affords of maintaining the supremacy of Religion, not only in theory and in precept, and in framing the laws and regulations, but in spirit and in truth, by suppressing or prohibiting all institutions, practices, and influences calculated to impair the love of God and man, as the ruling principle of action; thereby strengthening the motives to good conduct, and discouraging every temptation to evil, and more especially by rigidly excluding Competition and a spirit of rivalry.

"It is this pernicious principle of Competition that has been the great impediment, both in Catholic and Protestant countries, to the existence and diffusion of vital Christianity. It has perpetuated war, and left Christian Europe little to rejoice in from any diminution of its barbarous conflicts since the ambitious conquests of Pagan Rome. It has perverted the blessings of peace, and inflicted misery upon the people, no less fatal to their general improvement and happiness than the scourges of war, and it is the chief cause of the present famine.

"If Europe has the power, as no one can doubt, of producing food in superabundance, and of laying up a store of three or four years' supply for all its population, to guard against the consequences of bad harvests, why has it not been done? Because competition limits production to the market demand, and the market demand is limited, not by the actual wants of the people, but by their inability to purchase.

"If the wants of a neighbourhood require 1,000 quarters of corn, and 1,200 quarters are brought to market, there is a competition among the sellers, in order that they may not be the holders of the 200