1. This is man's love! What marvel? While to the fulness of your heart's glad heavings Waved softly to your breath! You ne'er kept watch And morn, all dazzling, as in triumph, broke You ne'er smooth'd His couch, ne'er sung him to his rosy rest, No! these are woman's tasks! In these her youth, We regret that we cannot give any extracts from 'the Last Constantine,' which is a poem well worthy of Mrs. Hemans's pen. In conclusion, we can only exhort this fair votary of the muses to persevere in the course which she has hitherto pursued with so much success. When we review the progress which she has made, and more especially when we turn to this last production of her pen, we feel assured that she cannot be under better guidance than that of her own taste and judgment. Let her continue to study, with the same devotion and fervour as heretofore, the works of our great poets:let her cherish that high moral sense which pervades all her writings; — and we do not doubt that we shall see her assume her merited station among the leading poets of her age. ART. VII. The Principle of the English Poor-Laws illustrated and defended, by an Historical View of Indigence in Civil Society; with Observations and Suggestions relative to their improved Administration. By Frederick Page, Esq., one of his Majesty's Deputy-Lieutenants for the County of Berks. 8vo. pp. 108. 4s. sewed. Hatchard, &c. 'POVERTY,' says Mr. Page, is compatible with honesty and respectability; indigence with the former; but mendicity with neither, and is, indeed, the first step to dishonesty.' (P. 37.) When mendicity becomes an habitual occupation, a trade, it is incompatible with honesty, because the object of the mendicant is to raise money under any pretences; N 3 ,, ; true, true, perhaps, as long as they answer the purpose, but false most probably, without scruple, when others do not. As soon as Gil Blas had left his uncle's house at Oviedo to seek his fortune, he threw the reins over his mule's neck, and began to count into his hat the number of ducats that were in his pocket: "For the love of God," exclaimed a feeble voice, "bestow your charity, Signor, upon a poor wounded soldier, and Heaven will reward you !" Turning towards the spot whence the voice proceeded, he saw a man in the garb of a soldier, about twenty yards off, resting his carbine on a forked stick in the ground, and deliberately taking aim at him. Gil Blas took the hint, "bestowed his charity," clapped spurs to his mule, and made off as fast as he could. The trade of such furulent beggars (if we may coin the word) is not less honest than was the trade of those fraudulent but sanctimonious mendicants, who issued forth in swarms from monasteries in former days under the denominations of Carmelites, Capuchins, and Dominicans, Hermits of the Order of St. Francis, and Hermits of the Order of St. Augustin. To make the slightest allusion to modern mendicants, however, either religious or political, would be a breach of good manners which we shall not commit; indeed, whenever a general and sweeping censure is passed, "the present company" is always excepted from its application. It is with poor beggars, moreover, that we are at present concerned. We have before us a very good pamphlet on this subject; though perhaps it may be thought that its display of learning is superfluous in a work for practical use. The author has largely consulted the Greek and Latin writers of antiquity, to shew what means were adopted for the maintenance of the poor at Athens, at Sparta, and at Rome; he has made repeated visits to the Continent, and compared the state of indigence in foreign countries with that in England; and he has argued the abstract question of the natural and indefeasible right of man in civil society to subsistence from the stores of his more fortunate fellow-creatures, deciding it in the affirmative. Mr. Malthus's proposal for abolishing our poor-laws results from a dogmatical assumption that the poor have no right to relief. After a godly exhortation from the clergyman to his pauper-audience, touching the sinfulness of marriage among them, he accordingly recommended the legislature to enact that, from a given period, no parochial assistance should at any time, or under any circumstance, be afforded to the offspring of marriages thereafter to be contracted, or to illegitimates thereafter born. Luckily, however, Mr. Malthus raised his frightful superstructure on a rotten foundation; for the poor poor have a right to relief, every where, and in all parts of the civilized world. Man has a natural and abstract right to subsistence every where; and, in England, to the recognition of this abstract right is added a legal claim. Every person born in this country has an acknowleged right to subsistence; and this, which is the popular feeling and the popular belief, is also the law of the land. A few words on this subject may not be amiss. "There is yet another case of necessity," says Blackstone, (b. iv. ch. ii. vi. 4.) "which has occasioned great speculation among the writers upon general law; viz. whether a man in extreme want of food or clothing may justify stealing either, to relieve his present necessities. And this both Grotius and Puffendorf, together with many other of the foreign jurists, hold in the affirmative; maintaining by many ingenious, humane, and plausible reasons, that in such cases the community of goods by a kind of tacit concession of society is revived." Among the absolute rights of man, is "that of personal security, consisting in a person's legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, health, and reputation; life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual." (Ibid. b. i. ch. i.) Would it not be a contradiction in terms to recognize a right and disallow the means of preserving it? When, therefore, Blackstone goes on to say that this doctrine of Grotius and Puffendorf, and which some of our own lawyers have also held, "seems to be unwarranted," he qualifies the remark by adding that "at least it is now antiquated, the law of England admitting no such excuse at present." Then comes the question, why does not the law of England admit such an excuse; for both the life and the limbs of a man are of such high value in the estimation of that law, that it pardons even homicide if committed se defendendo, or in order to preserve them? The reason is that the law not only regards life and member, but protects every man in the enjoyment of them, and furnishes him with every thing necessary for their support. "For there is no man so indigent or wretched but he may demand a supply sufficient for all the necessities of life from the more opulent part of the community: a humane provision, yet, though dictated by the principles of society, discountenanced by the Roman laws. For the edicts of the Emperor Constantine, commanding the public to maintain the children of those who were unable to provide for them, in order to prevent the murder and exposure of infants, an institution founded on the same principles as our Foundling L Hospitals, though comprized in the Theodosian Code, were N 4 rejected rejected in Justinian's Collection." We find Blackstone, therefore, virtually recognizing the abstract right of every man to supply himself with the means of maintaining life, as founded in nature and reason: but adding that it is merged in his civil duties and is sacrificed to public convenience in this country, in consideration of the provisions which society has there made for the protection of every man in the enjoyment of his life, and for supplying him with every thing necessary to support it. The properties of men, he observes, would be under a strange insecurity, if liable to be invaded according to the wants of others, of which wants no man can possibly be an adequate judge but the party himself who pleads them; and in this country, especially, there would be a peculiar impropriety in admitting so dubious an excuse: for by our laws such sufficient provision is made for the poor by the power of the civil magistrate, that the most needy stranger cannot be reduced to the absolute necessity of thieving to support nature. This case of a stranger is, by the way, the strongest instance put by Baron Puffendorf as the basis of his principal arguments; which, however they may hold good on the Continent, where the parsimonious industry of the natives orders every one to work or starve, must lose all their weight and efficacy in England, where charity is reduced to a system, and interwoven in our very constitution. Though no compulsory method was devised for the maintenance of the poor till the time of Henry VIII., yet by certain statutes in the reigns of Richard II. and Henry VII. the poor are directed to abide in the cities or towns wherein they were born, or had dwelt for three years; and it appears by "The Mirrour," as quoted by the above writer, that, by the common law, the poor were to be sustained by parsons, rectors of the church, and the parishioners; so that none of them die for default of sustenance." 66 The principle of our poor-laws is excellent; that needs no defence: but in the detail they are so bad, often in the administration so harsh, and in the assessment so preposterously unjust, that no labor can be more commendably bestowed than that which has for its object to reform them. Compassion, which may be defined a participation in the painful. feelings of another, is perhaps to be ranked among the original impulses of human nature: it prompts to the relief of human suffering, and is an emanation from the Divinity itself: -experience, however, has instructed us that it is too unsteady in its operation to allow us to exclusively rely on it. The disposition and the ability to relieve the wretched do not always correspond, and frequently do not meet in the same person: person: it may be necessary to extort from the iron-hearted miser his grudged uncharitable contribution; and it may be advisable to check the generous alms-deeds of others, whose sympathy and suceptibility of nature make them liable to imposition by the mere semblance of misery. Although the French have no poor-laws, they have, in addition to the private beneficence of individuals, various munificent institutions, endowed by gifts during the life of the donors, or testamentary; and in the year 1816 a system of domiciliary relief for the city of Paris was organized and promulgated by the French king, to which the labors of M. de Gerando principally contributed. To shew, however, the uncertainty of that relief which is dependant on individual benevolence, we give the following passage from the pamphlet before us, which states a fact - if indeed we must receive so incredible an account as true - of the most shocking nature. - * The Encyclopædia † had ridiculed, as superstitious, the respect in which the establishments, founded on Christian principles, for the relief of suffering humanity, had been hitherto held; they were condemned as narrow in their views, and founded on principles too confined for the great and extended views of philan thropy, with which the golden age of the French Revolution was to bless mankind. The National Convention, therefore, expressly recognizing the right of the poor to relief, determined on concentrating and generalizing all institutions of this nature, by raising a fund for this purpose from the nation at large, and selling all the property attached to the hospitals and establishments of this kind. This last measure was the only one adopted; and further, by the imposition of oaths which their conscience would not permit them to take, they lost the services of that most excellent order of men, the curés, or parish-priests; and of those amiable and exemplary females, the Sœurs de Charité, whom a spirit of religion had devoted to the labours of active charity. But the error was soon discovered; and in less than a year after the decree for the sale, it was repealed, when three-fifths of the property had been sold. But during this interval the poor languished and died, in poverty and distress; and in the defect of the means of the relief of one branch of indigence, the loss of human life would be almost incredible, if the fact was not ascertained by unquestionable documents. In the year 10 of the Revolution, the mean revenues of the hospitals at Lyons had been reduced to one-third. Owing to this deficit, there were insufficient funds to provide for the children brought into the Foundling Hospital there; and out of eight hundred and twenty children brought in *See his pamphlet intitled "Le Visiteur du Pauvre," of which we gave a brief notice in the Appendix to our ninety-second volume, page 470. "+"Dupin, Histoire de l'Administration de Secours Public." from |