becomes security, power, glory, and dominion. All that is required to render it so is, that we should go to the ant and the bee, consider their ways and be wise that we should learn from wise antiquity,..on this point indeed truly deserving to be styled so; that we should do our part in obedience to the first great commandment, which bids us Replenish the earth and subdue it.'

Let the reader cast a thought over the map, and see what elbow-room there is for England. We have Canada with all its territory, we have Surinam, the Cape Colony, Australasia,.. countries which are collectively more than fifty-fold the area of the British isles, and which a thousand years of uninterrupted prosperity would scarcely suffice to people. It is time that Britain should become the hive of nations, and cast her swarms; and here are lands to receive them. What is required of government is to encourage emigration by founding settlements, and facilitating the means of transport. Imagine these countries, as they would be a few centuries hence,..and must be, if some strange mispolicy does not avert this proper and natural course of things,.. the people enjoying that happiness and those domestic morals, which seem to proceed from no other root than the laws and institutions with which Providence has favoured us above all others; imagine these wide regions in the yet uncultivated parts of the earth flourishing like our own, and possessed by people enjoying our institutions and speaking our language. Whether they should be held in colonial dependence, or become separate states, or when they may have ceased to depend upon the parent country, remain

connected with her by the union of reverential attachment on one side, and common interests on both, is of little import upon this wide view of things. In America at this day, hostile America, unhappily alienated from her connection with England by our errors and the artifices of our common enemy, and now the wanton aggressor in a war undertaken in obsequiousness to that enemy,..still in America, whatever is civilized, whatever is intellectual, whatever is ennobling, whatever is good or great, is, and must ever be, of English origin.

6

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.' This was the first great commandment given for collective society, and what country has ever been so largely empowered to act in obedience to it as England at this day? The seas are ours, and to every part of the uninhabited or uncivilized world our laws, our language, our institutions, and our Bible may be communicated. Fear not, if these seeds be sown, but that God will give the increase! Earthquakes may shake this island from its foundation, or volcanic eruptions lay it waste, or it may sink into the abyss and leave only rocks and shoals to mark its place; (this earth bears upon it the monuments of wider physical devastation ;).. but earth itself must be destroyed before that from which Britain derives her pre-eminence can perish, if she do but enlarge herself, and send forth her blessings to the remotest parts of the globe.

ESSAY V.

ON

THE STATE OF THE POOR,

AND

THE MEANS PURSUED BY THE SOCIETY

FOR

BETTERING THEIR CONDITION.

1816.