The district school would no doubt be well superintended and well regulated; Magistrates and Country Gentlemen would be its visiters. The more excellent the establishment, the greater the mischief; because the greater the expense. We may talk what we will of economy, but where the care of the poor is taken exclusively into the hands of the rich, comparative extravagance is the necessary consequence: to say that the Gentleman, or even the Overseer, would never permit the poor to live at the district school, as they live at home, is saying far too little. English humanity will never see the poor in any thing like want, when that want is palpably and visibly brought before it; first, it will give necessaries, next comforts; until its fostering care rather pampers, than merely relieves. The humanity itself is highly laudable; but if practised on an extensive scale, its consequences must entail an almost unlimited expenditure.

‹ Mr. Locke computes that the labour of a child from 3 to 14, being set against its nourishment and teaching, the result will be exoneration of the parish from expense. Nothing could prove more decisively the incompetency of the Board of Trade to advise on this question. Of the productive labour of the workhouse, I shall have to speak hereafter; I will only observe in this place, that after the greatest care and attention bestowed on the subject, after expensive looms purchased, &c., the 50 boys of the Blue Coat School earned in the year 1816, 597. 10s. 3d.; the 40 girls earned, in the same time, 401. 7s. 9d. The ages of these children are from 8 to 16. They earn about one pound in the year and cost about twenty.

'The greater the call for labour in public institutions, be they prisons, workhouses, or schools, the more difficult to be procured that labour must be. There will thence be both much less of it for the comparative numbers, and it will afford a much less price; to get any labour at all, one school must underbid

another.

'It has just been observed, that "the child, of a poor cottager, half clothed, half fed, with the enjoyment of home and liberty, is not only happier but better than the little automaton of a parish workhouse:" and this I believe is accurately true. I scarcely know a more cheering sight, though certainly many more elegant ones, than the youthful gambols of a village green. They call to mind the description given by Paley of the shoals of the fry of fish: "They are so happy that they know not what to do with themselves; their attitude, their vivacity, their leaps out of the water, their frolics in it, all conduce to show their excess of spirits, and are simply the effects of that

excess."

Though politeness may be banished from the cottage, and though the anxious mother may sometimes chide a little too sharply, yet here both maternal endearments and social affection exist in perhaps their greatest vigour : the attachments of lower life, where independent of attachment there is so little to enjoy, far outstrip the divided if not exhausted sensibility of the rich and great; and in depriving the poor of these attachments, we may be said to rob them of their little all.

'But it is not to happiness only I here refer: it is to morals. I listen with great reserve to that system of moral instruction, which has not social affection for its basis, or the feelings of the heart for its ally. It is not to be concealed, that every thing may be taught, yet nothing learned, that systems planned with care and executed with attention, may evaporate into unmeaning forms, where the imagination is not roused, or the sensibility impressed.

'Let us suppose the children of the "district school," nurtured with that superabundant care which such institutions, when supposed to be well conducted, are wont to exhibit; they rise with the dawn; after attending to the calls of cleanliness, prayers follow; then a lesson; then breakfast; then work, till noon liberates them, for perhaps an hour, from the walls of their prison to the walls of their prison court. Dinner follows; and then, in course, work, lessons, supper, prayers; at length, after a day dreary and dull, the counterpart of every day which has preceded, and of all that are to follow, the children are dismissed to bed. This system may construct a machine, but it will not form a man. Of what does it consist? of prayers parroted

of

without one sentiment in accord with the words uttered: of moral lectures which the understanding does not comprehend, or the heart feel; of endless bodily constraint, intolerable to youthful vivacity, and injurious to the perfection of the human frame. The cottage day may not present so imposing a scene; no decent uniform; no well-trimmed locks; no glossy skin; no united response of hundreds of conjoined voices; no lengthened procession, misnamed exercise; but if it has less to strike the eye, it has far more to engage the heart. A trifle in the way cleanliness must suffice; the prayer is not forgot; it is perhaps imperfectly repeated, and confusedly understood; but it is not muttered as a vain sound; it is an earthly parent that tells of an heavenly one; duty, love, obedience, are not words without meaning, when repeated by a mother to her child: to Godthe great unknown Being that made all things, all thanks, all praise, all adoration is due. The young religionist may be in some measure bewildered by all this; his notions may be ob

scure, but his feelings will be roused, and the foundation at least of true piety will be laid.

'Of moral instruction, the child may be taught less at home than at school, but he will be taught better! that is, whatever he is taught he will feel; he will not have abstract propositions of duty coldly presented to his mind; but precept and practice will be conjoined; what he is told it is right to do will be instantly done. Sometimes the operative principle on the child's mind will be love, sometimes fear, sometimes habitual sense of obedience; it is always something that will impress, always something that will be remembered.'

There are two points which we consider as now admitted by all men of sense, 1st, That the Poor-Laws must be abolished; 2dly, That they must be very gradually abolished.* We hardly think it worth while to throw away pen and ink upon any one who is still inclined to dispute either of these propositions.

With respect to the gradual abolition, it must be observed, that the present redundant population of the country has been entirely produced by the Poor-Laws: and nothing could be so grossly unjust, as to encourage people to such a vicious multiplication, and then, when you happen to discover your folly, immediately to starve them into annihilation. You have been calling upon your population for two hundred years to beget more children-furnished them with clothes, food, and houses

taught them to lay up nothing for matrimony, nothing for children, nothing for age-but to depend upon Justices of the Peace for every human want. The folly is now detected; but the people, who are the fruit of it, remain. It was madness to call them in this manner into existence; but it would be the height of cold-blooded

I am not quite so wrong in this as I seem to be, nor after all our experience am I satisfied that there has not been a good deal of rashness and precipitation in the conduct of this admirable measure. You have not been able to carry the law into manufacturing counties. Parliament will compel you to soften some of the more severe clauses. It has been the nucleus of general insurrection and chartism. The Duke of Wellington wisely recommended that the experiment should be first tried in a few counties round the metropolis.

cruelty to get rid of them by any other than the most gentle and gradual means; and not only would it be cruel, but extremely dangerous, to make the attempt. Insurrections of the most sanguinary and ferocious nature would be the immediate consequence of any very sudden change in the system of the Poor-Laws; not partial, like those which proceed from an impeded or decaying state of manufactures, but as universal as the Poor-Laws themselves, and as ferocious as insurrections always are which are led on by hunger and despair.

These observations may serve as an answer to those angry and impatient gentlemen, who are always crying out, What has the Committee of the House of Commons done? What have they to show for their labours ?— Are the rates lessened?-Are the evils removed? The Committee of the House of Commons would have shown themselves to be a set of the most contemptible charlatans, if they had proceeded with any such indecent and perilous haste, or paid the slightest regard to the ignorant folly which required it at their hands. They have very properly begun, by collecting all possible information upon the subject; by consulting speculative and practical men; by leaving time for the press to contribute whatever it could of thought or knowledge to the subject; and by introducing measures, the effects of which will be, and are intended to be, gradual. The Lords seemed at first to have been surprised that the Poor-Laws were not abolished before the end of the first session of Parliament; and accordingly set up a little rival Committee of their own, which did little or nothing, and will not, we believe, be renewed. We are so much less sanguine than those noble legislators, that we shall think the improvement immense, and a subject of very general congratulation, if the Poorrates are perceptibly diminished, and if the system of pauperism is clearly going down in twenty or thirty years hence.

We think, upon the whole, that Government have been fortunate in the selection of the gentleman who is placed at the head of the Committee for the revision of

the Poor-Laws; or rather, we should say (for he is a gentleman of very independent fortune), who has consented that he should be placed there. Mr. Sturges Bourne is undoubtedly a man of business, and of very good sense he has made some mistakes; but, upon the whole, sees the subject as a philosopher and a statesman ought to do. Above all, we are pleased with his good nature and good sense in adhering to his undertaking, after the Parliament has flung out two or three of his favourite bills. Many men would have surrendered so unthankful and laborious an undertaking in disgust; but Mr. Bourne knows better what appertains to his honour and character, and, above all, what he owes to his country. It is a great subject; and such as will secure to him the gratitude and favour of posterity, if he bring it to a successful issue.

We have stated our opinion, that all remedies, without gradual abolition, are of little importance. With a foundation laid for such gradual abolition, every auxiliary improvement of the Poor-Laws (while they do remain) is worthy the attention of Parliament: and, in suggesting a few alterations as fit to be immediately adopted, we wish it to be understood, that we have in view the gradual destruction of the system, as well as its amendment while it continues to operate.

It seems to us, then, that one of the first and greatest improvements of this unhappy system would be a complete revision of the Law of Settlement. Since Mr. East's act for preventing the removal of the poor till they are actually chargeable, any man may live where he pleases, till he becomes a beggar, and asks alms of the place where he resides. To gain a settlement, then, is nothing more than to gain a right of begging: it is not, as it used to be before Mr. East's act, a power of residing where, in the judgment of the resident, his industry and exertion will be best rewarded; but a power of taxing the industry and exertions of other persons in the place where his settlement falls. This privilege produces all the evil complained of in the Poor-Laws; and instead therefore of being conferred with the