hands as from those born into a more fortunate position? Ought the same demands to be made upon the possessors of five talents as upon the possessors of ten? Surely the lot of the hard-handed labourer is pitiable enough without having harsh judgments passed upon him. Consider well these endowments of his-these capacities, affections, tastes, and the vague yearnings to which they give birth. Think of him now with his caged-up desires doomed to a daily, weekly, yearly round of painful toil, with very little remission save for food and sleep. Observe how he is tantalized by the pleasures he sees his richer brethren partaking of, but from which he must be for ever debarred. Note the humiliation he suffers from being looked down upon as of no account among men. And then remember that he has nothing to look forward to but a monotonous continuance of this till death. Is this a salutary state of things to live under?

It is very easy for you, O respectable citizen, seated in your easy chair with your feet on the fender, to hold forth on the misconduct of the people;-very easy for you to censure their extravagrant and vicious habits;-very easy for you to be a pattern of frugality, of rectitude, of sobriety. What else should you be? Here are you surrounded by comforts, possessing multiplied sources of lawful happiness, with a reputation to maintain, an ambition to fulfil, and the prospect of a competency for your old age. A shame indeed would it be if with these advantages you were not well regulated in your behaviour. You have a cheerful home, are warmly and cleanly clad, and fare, if not sumptuously every day, at any rate abundantly. For your hours of relaxation there are amusements. A newspaper arrives regularly to satisfy your curiosity; if your tastes are literary, books may be had in plenty; and there is a piano if you like music. You can afford to entertain your friends, and are entertained in return. There are lectures, and concerts, and exhibitions, accessible if you incline to them. You may have a holiday when you choose to take one, and can spare money for an

annual trip to the sea-side. And enjoying all these privileges you take credit to yourself for being a well-conducted man! Small praise to you for it! If you do not contract dissipated habits where is the merit? you have few incentives to do so. It is no honour to you that you do not spend your savings in sensual gratification; you have pleasures enough without. But what would you do if placed in the position of the labourer? How would these virtues of yours stand the wear and tear of poverty? Where would your prudence and self-denial be if you were deprived of all the hopes that now stimulate you; if you had no better prospect than that of the Dorsetshire farm-servant with his 108. a week, or that of the perpetually-straitened stocking-weaver, or that of the mill-hand with his not infrequent suspensions of work? Let us see you tied to an irksome employment from dawn till dusk; fed on meagre food, and scarcely enough of that; married to a factory girl ignorant of domestic management; deprived of the enjoyments which education opens up; with no place of recreation but the pot-house; and then let us see whether you would be as steady as you are. Suppose your savings had to be made, not, as now, out of surplus income, but out of wages already insufficient for necessaries; and then consider whether to be provident would be as easy as you at present find it. Conceive yourself one of a class contemptuously termed "the great unwashed;" stigmatized as brutish, stolid, vicious; suspected of harbouring wicked designs; and then say whether the desire to be respectable would be as practically operative on you as now. Lastly, imagine that seeing your capacities were but ordinary, and your competitors innumerable, you despaired of ever attaining to a higher station; and then think whether the incentives to perseverance and forethought would be as strong as your existing ones.

After all it is a pitiful controversy, this about the relative vices of rich and poor. Two school-boys taunting each other

with faults of which they were equally guilty, would best parody it. While indignant Radicalism denounces "the vile aristocrats," these in their turn enlarge with horror on the brutality of the mob. Neither party sees its own sins. Neither party recognizes in the other, itself in a different dress. Neither party can believe that it would do all the other does if placed in like circumstances. Yet a cool bystander finds nothing to choose between them-knows that these class-recriminations are but the inflammatory symptoms of a uniformly-diffused immorality. Label men how you please with titles of "upper," and "middle," and "lower," you cannot prevent them being units of the same society, acted upon by the same spirit of the age, moulded after the same type of character. The mechanical law that action and reaction are equal, has its moral analogue. The deed of one man to another tends ultimately to produce a like effect on both, be the deed good or bad. Do but put them in relationship, and no division into castes, no differences of wealth, can prevent men from assimilating. Whoso is placed among the savage will in process of time grow savage too; let his companions be treacherous and he will become treacherous in self-defence; surround him with the kind-hearted and he will soften; amid the refined he will acquire polish; and the same influences which thus rapidly adapt the individual to his society, ensure, though by a slower process, the general uniformity of a national character. This is no unsupported theory. Look when or where we please, thickly-strewn proofs may be gathered. The cruelties of the old Roman rulers were fully paralleled by those over which the populace gloated in their arenas. During the servile wars of the middle ages, barons tortured rebels and rebels tortured barons, with equally diabolical ferocity. Those massacres which took place a few years since in Galicia, covered with infamy both the people who committed them and the government which paid for them at per head. The Assam chiefs, to whom the East India Company have allowed compensation

for abandoning their established right of plunder, are neither better nor worse than the mass of the people, among whom joint-stock robbing companies are common. A similar sameness is exhibited in Russia, where all are alike swindlers, from the Prince Marshal who cheats the troops out of their rations, the officers who rob the Emperor of his stores, the magistrates who require bribing before they will act, the police who have secret treaties with the thieves, the shopkeepers who boast of their successful trickeries, down to the postmasters and drosky-drivers with their endless impcsi-. tions. In Ireland, during the last century, while the people. had their faction fights and secret revenge societies, duelling formed the amusement of the gentry, and was carried to such a pitch that the barrister was bound to give satisfaction to the witness he had bullied, or to the client who was dissatisfied with him.* And let us not forget how completely this unity of character is exhibited by the Irish of to-day, among whom Orangemen and Catholics display the same truculent bigotry; among whom magistrates and people join in party riots; and among whom the improvidence of the peasantry is to be paralleled only by that of the landlords. Our own history furnishes like illustrations in plenty. The time when England swarmed with highwaymen and outlaws, and when the populace had that sneaking kindness for a bold robber, still shown in some parts of the Continent, was the time when kings also played the bandit; when they cheated their creditors by debasing the coinage; when they impressed labourers to build their palaces (Windsor Castle, for instance), obliging them under pain of imprisonment to take the wages offered; and when they seized and sold men's goods, paying the owners less than a third of what the goods realized. During the age of religious persecution, Papists martyred Protestants and Protestants martyred Papists, with equal

"It is time," said a veteran of this school, "to retire from the bar, since this new-fangled special pleading has superseded the use of gunpowder."-Sketches of Ireland Sixty Years Ago.

cruelty; and Cavaliers and Roundheads treated each other with the same rancor In the present day dishonesty shows itself not less in the falsification of dockyard accounts, or the "cooking" of.railway-reports, than in burglary or sheepstealing; while those who see heartlessness in the dealings of slop-tailers and their sweaters, may also find it in the conduct of rich landlords who get double rent from poor allotment holders,* and in that of responsible ladies who uitderpay half-starved seamstresses.† Changes in tastes and amusements are similarly common to all. The contrast between the Squire Westerns and their descendants has its analogy among the people. As in Spain a bull-fight is still the favourite pastime of both the Queen and her subjects, so in England fifty years ago, the cock-pit and the prize-ring were patronized alike by peer and pauper; and a reference to the sporting papers will show that the lingering instincts of the savage are at this moment exhibited by about an equal percentage of all classes.

#

If by ignorance is meant want of information on matters

Allotments are generally given on poor and useless pieces of land, but the thorough cultivation they receive soon raises them to a high pitch of fertility. The more fertile they become the more the rent of each portion is increased, and we were informed that there are at present allotments on the Duke's property which, under the influence of the same competition which exists with reference to farms, bring his Grace a rent of 21., 31., and even 47. an acre."-The Times Agricultural Commissioner on the Blenheim Estates.

+ See letters on "Labour and the Poor." An Officer's widow says:"Generally, the ladies are much harder as to their terms than the tradespeople; oh, yes, the tradespeople usually show more lenity towards the needlewomen than the ladies. I know the mistress of an institution who refused some chemises of a lady who wanted to have them made at 9d. She said she would not impose upon the poor workpeople so much as to get them made at that price."-Morning Chronicle, November 16, 1849. A vendor of groundsel and turfs for singing birds says:-"The ladies are very hard with a body. They tries to beat me down, and particular in the matter of turfs. They tell me they can buy half-a-dozen for 1d., so I'm obligated to let 'em have three or four."-Morning Chronicle, November 20, 1849.