ESSAY V.

ON THE STATE OF THE POOR,

&c. &c.

DURING many ages it was an undisputed opinion that the state of the world was continually growing worse, according to the complaint of Horace:

It was even believed that the earth itself decayed as it grew old, and that nature in all her operations was debilitated with age. "There have been many great inquests,' says Joshua Sylvester,

To find the cause why bodies still grow less,
And daily nearer to the pigmies' size.'

To confute this opinion, Hakewill wrote his Apology, or Declaration of the Power and 'Providence of God in the Government of the • World.' Some of the good old archdeacon's topics may excite a smile in these times: he clears away doubts touching the strong physic which the ancients used,' and' touching the length of 'the duodenum, or first gut,' which in the Greeks

was said to be twelve inches long, and in these degenerate days hardly four, an objection which, of any he had met with, was most fully opened and seriously urged by Archangelus Piccolomini in his Anatomical Lectures,' . . and which would evince that the happiness of an Athenian archon exceeded that of a London alderman in the proportion of three to one. And he proves that the human race was not less prolific in his age than in elder times, by the epitaph of Dame Honeywood, of Charing, in Kent, who had, at her decease, 367 children lawfully descended from her; and by that of a woman in Dunstable Church 'who bore at three several times three children at a birth, and five at a birth two other times.' But his moral philosophy is of a higher strain, and may command our respect both for its truth, and for the feeling with which he has expressed it.

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' How other men,' says he, may stand affected in reading I know not; sure I am that in writing it often lifted up my soul in admiring and praising the infinite wisdom and bounty of the Creator in maintaining and managing his own work, in the government and preservation of the universe, which in truth is nothing else 'but (as the schools speak) continuata productio, a continuated production: and often did it call to my mind those holy raptures of the Psalmist, "" O Lord, how glorious are thy works, and thy thoughts are very deep: an unwise man doth ""not well consider this, and a fool doth not un""derstand it." I must confess that, sometimes looking stedfastly upon the present face of things both at home and abroad, I have often

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been put to a stand, and staggered in mine opinion whether I were in the right or no: and perchance the state of my body, and present 'condition in regard of those fair hopes I sometime had, served as false perspective glasses to 'look through. But when again I abstracted and 'raised my thoughts to an higher pitch, and as 'from a vantage ground took a larger view, com" paring time with time, and thing with thing, and 'place with place, and considered myself as a ' member of the universe, and a citizen of the world, I found that what was lost to one part เ was gained to another, and what was lost to one ' time was to the same part recovered in another, and so the balance, by the Divine Providence overruling all, kept upright. Qui ad pauca respicit de facili pronunciat, saith Aristotle: he 'that is so narrow eyed as he looks only to his own person or family, to his own corporation or nation, or the age wherein himself lives, will peradventure quickly pronounce that all things decay and go backward, which makes men murmur and repine against God under the name of Fortune and Destiny. Whereas he 'that, as a part of mankind in general, takes a 'view of the universal, compares person with person, family with family, corporation with corporation, nation with nation, age with age, suspends his judgement, and upon examination clearly finds that all things work together for the 6 best to them that love God.'

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With this feeling, founded upon wise observation, and sustained by piety, did Hakewill combat the then prevailing notion of the progressive de

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terioration of mankind. The stream of opinion took a different direction in the last century. A shallow and self-sufficient generation had then arisen, who proclaimed themselves to be the only philosophers; their metaphysical, moral, and political discoveries were offered to the world with all the impudence of quackery, and, like a quack's nostrums, they were received for a season with fatal confidence. That season is gone by: bitter disappointment has brought with it humility; we are now but too feelingly convinced that no violent and rapid melioration in society is possible, and that great and sudden changes are evils in themselves and in their consequences. But it is not the less certain that the general condition of the world may be greatly improved, and especially that part of it in the improvement of which we are most nearly concerned it is not the less certain that of the moral and physical evils which afflict mankind, many, very many, are remediable; and that if any country be

...... an unweeded garden That runs to seed,'

the fault lies in those who should cultivate it, not in the soil or climate.

A proud statement of the strength and prosperity of the British empire has lately been laid before the public; and although sums which ascend from hundreds of thousands of millions to billions look as if they were calculated in Portugueze reis rather than in pounds sterling, and seem at first to stagger or confound belief, the detail from which they are deduced is in many parts officially accurate, and, in all others, approximates to the reality; nor can

the general result be controverted that the wealth and power, and resources of this empire, form a phenomenon to which no parallel can be found in the history of the world. The public are indebted to Mr. Colquhoun also for another work, not less curious than this late important compilation, but leaving upon the reader's mind a very different impression,.. his treatise upon the Police of the Metropolis. That treatise lays open the extent to which crimes are carried in the huge capital of this mighty empire,..a frightful extent, .. yet it relates only a part of the wickedness of the community, and that part only which is cognizable by human laws: how large a portion, then, remains untold! Of the poverty also which exists among us we have a faithful statement, as far as it can be expressed by numerical figures: the sum of existing wretchedness is not to be numbered; its intensity every man may estimate by what has fallen under his own notice, if he be not one of those who keep aloof from the contemplation of human misery; but its extent is known only to Him unto whom the prayers and the groans of the miserable ascend.

The solid, substantial, permanent welfare of a nation is not to be estimated by extent of dominion, or greatness of population, or amount of revenue, or of national wealth. This outward prosperity might be, like the antediluvian earth, such as Burnet has imagined it in his magnificent philosophical dream, a fertile and beautiful surface,.. but only a surface,.. only a crust which enveloped the waters of the abyss, and which never appeared more flourishing than at the moment