in any former age or country; it has enabled us to raise a revenue which twenty years ago we ourselves should have thought it impossible to support, and it has added even more to the activity of the country than to its ostensible wealth; but in a far greater degree, perhaps, has it diminished its happiness and lessened its security. Adam Smith's book is the code, or confession of faith of this system; a tedious and hard-hearted book, greatly overvalued even on the score of ability, for fifty pages would have comprised its sum and substance as well as two Scotch quartos.

Cent et cent fois penser un penser mesme,

as Ronsard says, is very natural for a lover, but not very excusable for him if he writes verses, and altogether insufferable in an author of any other description. That book considers man as a manufacturing animal, a definition which escaped the ancients: it estimates his importance, not by the sum of goodness and of knowledge which he possesses, not by the virtues and charities which should flow towards him and emanate from him, not by the happiness of which he may be the source and centre, not by the duties to which he is called, not by the immortal destinies for which he is created; but by the gain which can be extracted from him, or of which he can be made the instrument. The more perfect the fabric in which he is employed, the less intellect is required; eyes and fingers are all that are needed. This philosophy, indeed, deals with him as Diogenes did with the cock, in derision of Plato's definition. Pluck the wings of his intellect, strip him of the down and plumage of his virtues, and behold in the brute, denuded, pitiable animal, the man of the manufacturing system!

Some of the sciences and many of the arts require large cities to foster them; they thrive there like exotics in a town-conservatory; but the virtues and the comforts of inferior life wither away in such atmospheres like flowers transplanted from the field to pine at a street window. The peasant, however much his religious education may be neglected, cannot grow up without receiving some of the natural and softening impressions of religion. Sunday is to him a day of rest, not of dissipation: the sabbath bells come to his ear with a sweet and tranquillizing sound; and though he may be inattentive to the services of the church, and uninstructed in its tenets, still the church and the churchyard are to him sacred things; there is the font in which he was baptized, the altar at which his parents became man and wife, the place where they and their fathers before them have listened to the word of God, the graves wherein they have been laid to rest in the Lord, and where he is one day to be laid beside them. Alas for him, who cannot comprehend how these things act upon the human heart! The VOL. IL New Series.

5

town manufacturer is removed from all these gentle and genial influences; he has no love for his birth-place, or his dwelling-place, and cares nothing for the soil in which he strikes no root. One source of patriotism is thus destroyed; for in the multitude, patriotism grows out of local attachments. Omne solum forti patria may be said by the exile and the cosmopolite philosopher, but natale solum is found among the periphrases for patria, and the same feeling will be found in the language of every people who are advanced one degree beyond the savage state.

The manufacturing poor are also removed from other causes which are instrumental to good conduct in the agricultural classes. They have necessarily less of that attachment to their employers which arises from long connexion, and the remembrance of kind offices received, and faithful services performed-an inheritance transmitted from parent to son: and being gathered together in herds from distant parts, they have no family character to support in the place to which they have been transplanted. Their employments, too, unlike those of the handicraft and the agriculturist, are usually so conducted as to be equally pernicious to mind and body. The consumption of life in some manufactories, even in those which might at first be thought most innocuous, though it may be a consolation to those philosophers who are afraid of being crowded at the table of nature, would make good men shudder if the account could be fully laid before them.

John Hunter predicted that our manufactories would engender new varieties of pestilence. New and specific diseases they have produced; but the only pestilence which has yet manifested itself is of a moral nature. Physical diseases are not more surely generated by crowding human beings together in a state of filth and wretchedness, than moral ones by herding them together in a state of ignorance. This is the case under the least unfavourable circumstances which can be imagined; but it is doubly so under the manufacturing system, where children are trained up in the way wherein that system destines them to go, as soon as their little fingers can twirl a thread, or feed a machine. When that system was at its height, the slave trade itself was scarcely more systematically remorseless. The London workhouses supplied children by wagon-loads to those manufactories which would take them off the hands of the parish; a new sort of trade was invented, a set of child-jobbers travelled the country, procuring children from parents whose poverty was such as to consent to the sacrifice, and undertaking to feed, clothe, and lodge them for the profits of their labour. In this manner were many of our great manufactories supplied! the machinery never stood still. One set of these poor ehildren worked by day, another by night, and when one relay was relieved, they turned into the beds which had been vacated

by the other, warm as the others had left them! When this system had continued long enough for those who lived through so unnatural a childhood to reach the age of maturity, it was found that the girls, when they married, were utterly unable to perform the commonest and most indispensable domestic work; and the remedy which was devised, in future, was, that they should go to school to learn these things for an hour in the day after they had done work! These evils have been mitigated: the hellish practice of nightwork (it deserves no gentler qualification) is nearly, if not totally, disused; but enough which is evil remains to produce irreparable injury to the individuals, and the most serious mischief to the community. The existing race of the manufacturing poor have been trained up certainly without moral, and, it may be said, without religious instruction also; for if a pulpit lesson should now and then by accident reach their ears, there is little chance of its penetrating farther, utterly unprepared as they are to receive it. Among the philosophers-errant who mislead themselves as well as others in confounding the distinctions between right and wrong, there are some who, after wandering about the debatable ground between good and evil, recover the right path, and find grace to thank Providence for their escape. The bias inclines that way in the middle and higher ranks; for morals, as well as manners, follow the mode, and decorum, at least, is in fashion. But the class of which we have been speaking, have more to resist at the same time that they are less prepared for resistance. He who has ever seen

the habitations of the city-poor in the cellars and garrets of courts and alleys, will easily believe that the fireside of the pot-house holds out a stronger temptation than even the physical effect of the liquor. Goldsmith has told us how such places

"impart

An hour's importance to the poor man's heart;"

But they do more than this: they afford a stimulus of society which he cannot find elsewhere; strong humour and vulgar wit come with double fascination to those whose intellectual powers are stagnant at home; the coarseness of boisterous mirth acts upon them with double excitement; and if they give themselves up to the lowest vices, ought we to wonder at this, when their better faculties have never been brought into action? Scarce lower than the angels in the capacity of his nature, man is yet, when left to himself, scarcely above the brutes; and if he be depraved, as well as ignorant, he is then chiefly distinguished from them by the fatal prerogative of possessing a wicked will and greater powers of mischief. When his diviner part has never been called forth, the mere animal is all that remains, and mere animal gratification must be the natural end and aim of his blind desires.

These are not the mere imaginations of a speculative moralist. It is notorious that the manners of the people in manufacturing districts are peculiarly dissolute. Saint Monday is the only saint in the journeyman's calendar; and there are many places where one of the working-days of the week is regularly set apart for drunkenness, like a sabbath of irreligion. However high the wages may be, profligacy of every kind keeps pace, and draws after it its inevitable punishment of debility, disease, poverty, want, and early death. For the main cause of the increase of pauperism it is needless to go farther than the increase of manufactures-that very increase which has so often been triumphantly appealed to in proof of the prosperity of the country. Even in quiet times, and when, to all outward appearances, the country was flourishing beyond all example in former ages, the evil was felt, an evil in itself of sufficient magnitude, but of the most frightful nature when those circumstances are considered which give it a direct political bearing. This tendency was noticed some years ago in Espriella's Letters, a book in which, amid lighter matter, grave subjects are sometimes touched with a deeper spirit of thought than appears upon the surface.

"Two causes," says the author of that book," and only two, will rouse a peasantry to rebellion; intolerable oppression, or religious zeal either for the right faith or the wrong: no other motive is powerful enough. A manufacturing poor is more easily instigated to revolt. They have no local attachments; the persons to whom they look up for support, they regard more with envy than respect, as men who grow rich by their labour; they know enough of what is passing in the political world to think themselves politicians; they feel the whole burden of taxation, which is not the case with the peasant, because he raises a great part of his own food; they are aware of their own numbers; and the moral feelings which in the peasant are only blunted are in these men debauched. A manufacturing populace is always ripefor rioting the direction which this fury may take is accidental. In 1780 it ran against the catholics; in 1790 against the dissenters. Governments who found their prosperity upon manufactures sleep upon gunpowder.

"Do I then think," continues the writer, "that England is in danger of revolution? If the manufacturing system continues to be extended, increasing, as it necessarily does increase, the number, the misery, and the depravity of the poor, I believe that revolution inevitably must come, and in its most fearful shape. That system, if it continues to increase, will more effectually tend to ruin England than all the might and all the machinations of her enemies, were they ten times more formidable than they are. It communicates just knowledge enough to the populace to make them dangerous, and it poisons their morals. The temper of the mob has been manifested at the death of Despard, and there is no reason to suppose that it is not the same in all other great

towns as in London. It will be well for England when her cities shall decrease, and her villages multiply and grow; when there shall be fewer streets and more cottages. The tendency of the present system is to convert the peasantry into poor; her policy should be to reverse this, and to convert the poor into peasantry; to increase them and to enlighten them; for their numbers are the strength, and their knowledge is the security, of states."

Whether this writer be Spaniard or Englishman, the Luddites and the temper which the mob in London, as well as in Nottingham, manifested upon the murder of Mr. Perceval, have but too fully approved his foresight. How that temper has been produced deserves farther investigation. The state of parties and the press will go far towards explaining it. That there is any organized plan for effecting a revolution in this country we are far from asserting or believing, but it by no means follows that the preparatory work of revolution is not going on. There is no commissariat for supplying London, and yet London is supplied with a regularity and abundance which no commissariat, however perfect, could possibly accomplish. If one political writer vilifies every measure of the existing administration; if another reviles all parties in their turn with equal virulence; if a third systematically holds up the royal family to derision and abhorrence; and a fourth labours to bring the whole system of government into contempt and hatred; though the first should merely be the faithful adherent of a political faction; though mere malevolence should be the influencing motive of the second; the third be actuated by mere humour, or by neediness acting upon a profligate mind; and the fourth be led astray by juvenile presumption, or mistaken zeal; though these persons should be utterly unconnected, or even hostile to each other, they coöperate as effectually together to one direct end as if they were bound by oaths and sacraments, and that end is as directly the overthrow of their country as if all four were the salaried instruments of France.

He who finds a factious newspaper upon his breakfast table, and casting his eyes over its columns while he sips his coffee, smiles at its blunders, or at most vents a malediction more in wonder than in indignation at the impudent villany of its falsehoods, has but a faint conception of its effects upon the great body of its readers. Journals of this description are not designed for those whose place in society indisposes them to revolutionary tenets, or whom a sound anderstanding, and a mind well stored, have fortified, as with Mithridate, against such poison. But there are thousands, and tens of thousands, prepared for it by the manufacturing system as completely as soldiers, by want and cold, are prepared for camp contagion. It is upon men whom that system has depraved that the diatribes of the anarchists operate with full effect. Those