ESSAY IX.

ON THE MEANS OF IMPROVING TH PEOPLE

THE ruin of this kingdom has been predicted shallow statesmen and malcontents rather n frequently than the destruction of the world been announced by crazy prophets. Yet, bec such predictions have proved only the presum ousness and folly, or the malevolence and mad of those by whom they were uttered, nothing c be more illogical than to conclude that the w will hold on its regular course to all eternity, or the fortune of Great Britain will always bear i umphantly through all difficulties. The doctri climacterical years is justly accounted among obsolete errors of medicine, yet there are season life wherein the probabilities of disease and are greater than at others;.. and so it is in the stitution of society. It cannot, indeed, be known, as in the human constitution, when seasons are to be expected, but they may be discerned by a judicious observer when they co and he must have observed little, and reflected who does not perceive that this is one of critical seasons,..perhaps a more momentous

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, 1 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

wisdom, best comforteth man.' To look elsewhere for assistance and relief would have been equally painful to the one party and injurious to the other. The old man had no sense of degradation in accept ing the bounty of those for whom he had faithfully laboured in his youth and strength; there was no humiliation inflicted or intended; it was part of the payment of his services, a debt of kindness and good-will, cheerfully paid and gratefully received. As the metropolis grew more attractive, the Lady Bountifuls and the Sir Roger de Coverlys became extinct: men mingled more with the world, and women attended more regularly at Vanity Fair. The peasantry, however, were still attached to the, soil, and took root where they were born. The beneficial effects of this were that they grew up with a sense of family pride; the son did not wish to leave behind him a worse remembrance than his father; a good name was part of his inheritance, and, in case of unavoidable misfortunes, it assured him relief; for charity is as much the characteristic of civilized man, as cruelty is of the savage. It is not necessary to look back beyond the memory of man for this state of things as very generally existing throughout the country. A labourer would not, without extreme reluctance, apply for parochial aid, and nothing but extreme necessity could induce him to enter a poor-house. They who were reconciled to the inevitable lot of poverty shrunk from the disgrace of pauperism; and many are the instances wherein money which could ill be spared from the scanty provision of old age has been laid aside, that there might be something to defray the expenses of a decent funeral without coming upon

VOL. II.

I

the parish, as it was called, even after death: such within our recollection used to be the character of the stationary poor.

Some price is paid for every improvement in society, and every stage in our progress brings with it its concomitant evils: if the good do but predominate it is all we can expect in this imperfect world, and all that we ought to desire,.. for this is not our abiding-place. In the middle rank of life, which is assuredly the happiest, (and which in this country and at this time is beyond all doubt the most favourable situation wherein man has ever been placed for the cultivation of his moral and intellectual nature,) the greatest abatement of happiness arises from the dispersion of families and the breaking up of family ties. When we think of the patriarchal age, it is its exemption from this evil that constitutes its peculiar and almost romantic charm. How rarely is it that a large family is ever collected together after the years of childhood are past! the daughters are transplanted into other households; the sons go east and west in search of fortune, separated from each other and from their birth-place by wide tracts of sea and land; they are divided in youth, and when those meet again, who live to meet, the first feeling is that sinking of the spirit which the sense of time and change produces, embodied then as it were, and pressing upon the heart with all the weight of mortality. There is much to compensate for this in the middle ranks of life; communication is maintained in absence; a home for the natural affections exists,.. a resting-place where hope and memory meet; a wider scene of action brings with it increase of knowledge, enlargement of mind, new

jors and new powers of enjoyment,.. in most cases manifest balance of good. But the migratory yeon extends lower in society where there are not e same qualifying circumstances: it has arisen, as it became needful: the state and the general good require that it should be so; it recruits our fleets and our armies, it furnishes hands for our manufactures, and supplies the consumption of life in our great cities; but its moral effects upon the great majority are lamentably injurious. The eye and the voice of a parent never wholly lose their effect over minds which are not decidedly disposed to choose the evil part; and there are always in a man's birth-place those whose good opinion he has been desirous of obtaining, and to whom he is inclined to listen with habitual deference. From such wholesome influences the uneducated and the ill-educated are removed at an age when they stand most in need of affectionate counsel and prudent control. They go where they are altogether strangers, or at least where there are none who have a near and dear concern in watching over their welfare. Good and evil manners are both contagious; but the evil contagion is the stronger, and it is to this that they are most exposed.

And here we may notice one cause of moral deterioration which operates widely, at present, among the class of which we are speaking,..the practice among the lower order of manufacturers and tradesmen of taking out-of-door apprentices," instead of boarding them in the house, as was the old custom. Boys and lads just rising into manhood, are thus left to themselves and to each other, without the slightest control, except that of their