ESSAY IX. ON THE MEANS OF IMPROVING THE PEOPLE. THE ruin of this kingdom has been predicted by shallow statesmen and malcontents rather more frequently than the destruction of the world has been announced by crazy prophets. Yet, because such predictions have proved only the presumptuousness and folly, or the malevolence and madness of those by whom they were uttered, nothing could be more illogical than to conclude that the world will hold on its regular course to all eternity, or that the fortune of Great Britain will always bear it triumphantly through all difficulties. The doctrine of climacterical years is justly accounted among the obsolete errors of medicine, yet there are seasons of life wherein the probabilities of disease and death are greater than at others; . . and so it is in the constitution of society. It cannot, indeed, be foreknown, as in the human constitution, when such seasons are to be expected, but they may be well discerned by a judicious observer when they come; and he must have observed little, and reflected less, who does not perceive that this is one of those critical seasons,.. perhaps a more momentous one than that in which the restoration of letters and the invention of printing, the reformation in religion and the discovery of India and America, gave a new impulse to mankind, and affected them more or less throughout the globe. Whether the crisis shall be for evil or for good depends, under Providence, mainly upon ourselves. It must be for great good or for great evil. Let us inquire what may be done toward assisting the benignant indications, and counteracting those of an opposite character. In the progress of that great question, which is at this time before Parliament, it may reasonably be hoped that some radical improvement will be effected in the poor laws, and in the condition of that class for whose benefit they were designed, but to whose deterioration they have unquestionably tended. The evil which these laws have produced increased slowly during the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century, because it had much to overcome in the habits and character of the English peasantry. There are feelings which for a while survive the institutions from whence they have grown: the dependence which the feudal system created was of this kind. Long after the lord had ceased to require the service of his vassals in war, and to estimate his power by the number of men whom he could bring into the field either for or against his sovereign, the bond between them continued unbroken. They who were born upon his lands looked to him as their natural protector; the castle or the manor-house was open to them upon festival days, and from thence they were supplied in sickness with homely medicines, and that good diet, which, as old Tusser says,' with |