and tall gables. There was a world of well-dressed company that evening in Dumfries; for the aristocracy of the adjacent country for twenty miles round had poured in to attend a county ball, and were fluttering in groupes along the sunny side of the street, gay as butterflies. On the other side, in the shade, a solitary individual paced slowly along the pavement. Of the hundreds who fluttered past, no one took notice of him ; no one seemed to recognise him. He was known to them all as the exciseman and poet, Robert Burns; but he had offended the stately Toryism of the district by the freedom of his political creed; and so, tainted by the plague of Liberalism, he lay under strict quarantine. He was

shunned and neglected; for it was with the man Burns that these his contemporaries had to deal. Let the reader contrast with this truly melancholy scene, the scene of his festival a fortnight since. Here are the speeches of the Earl of Eglinton and of Sir John M'Neill, and here the toast of the Lord Justice-General. Let us just imagine these gentlemen, with all their high aristocratic notions about them, carried back half a century into the past, and dropped down, on the sad evening to which we refer, in the main street of Dumfries. Which side, does the reader think, would they have chosen to walk upon? Would they have addressed the one solitary individual in the shade, or not rather joined themselves to the gay groupes in the sunshine who neglected and contemned him? They find it an easy matter to deal with the phantom idea of Burns now: how would they have dealt with the man then? How are they dealing with his poorer relatives; or how with men of kindred genius, their contemporaries? Alas! a moment's glance at such matters is sufficient to show how very unreal a thing a commemorative feast may be. Reality, even in idea, becomes a sort of Ithuriel spear to test it by. The Burns' festival was but an idle show, at which players enacted their parts.

There is another score on which we dislike hero-worship. We deem it a sad misapplication of an inherent disposition of the mind, imparted for the most solemnly important of purposes. "Man worships man," says Cowper. The tendency, either directly or in its effects, we find indicated in almost every page of the history of the species. We see it in every succeeding period, from its times of full development, when the men-gods of the Greek were worshipped by sacrifice and oblation, down to the times of the Shakspeare jubilee at Stratford on-Avon, or the times of the Burns' festival at Ayr. But the sentiment, thus active in expatiating in false direction, has a true direction in which to expatiate, and a worthy object on which to fix. As if to dash the dull and frigid dreams of the Socinian, the instinct of man-worship may find a true man worthy the adoration of all, and who reigns over the nations as their God and King. Every other species of man-worship is a robbery of Him. It is a worship that belongs of right to the man Christ Jesus alone,—the "God whose throne is for ever and ever," and whom "all the angels of God worship."-August 24, 1844.

Library.

Of Californis

ESSAYS, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL.

OUR WORKING CLASSES.

NEVER in the history of the world have so many efforts been made to improve the condition of the working classes as at the present time. The legislator, the philanthropist, the city missionary, the theorist, who would do his best to uproot the very foundations of our social system, and the man of practice, who would spare no exertion to ameliorate its actual condition, have been at work, each in his several direction, honestly, earnestly, and unremittingly toiling to a single purpose, the elevation of our working people. We have passed laws; we have devised model dwellings; we have sent pious men to hunt out ignorance and vice; we have schemed out theories that would mow down the institutions of ages; we have speculated in the direction of secular socialism and in the direction of Christian socialism; we have tried co-operative societies, building societies, and model lodgings; we have written, lectured, and taught; we have appointed commissions, printed acres of reports; pried into every hole and corner of society (except the convents); we have exported hundreds of thousands of what we termed, only a year or two

back, our "surplus population ;" we have raised wages, diminished competition, and founded magnificent colonies with those who were too many at home; we have done these and many other things; and what has been the result? Have we moved the living mass of our workpeople a single step higher in the scale of moral existence? Have we taught them wisdom as well as knowledge? Have we taught them to be provident, and to manage their own affairs with prudence and discretion? Have we placed them in circumstances where they fulfil their duties as men? Have we, in fact, succeeded, after all our labours, in promoting the genuine welfare of the working population? To answer this question either with a summary affirmative or with an emphatic No, would be out of place. That all the expended labour has been wasted and thrown away, we cannot for a moment believe; but it is equally certain that the present condition of our working classes is pre-eminently unsatisfactory, and that no such general improvement has taken place as would entitle us to say that we had arrived at the true solution of this great social problem. Two things there are which, in every condition of life, mark the wellbeing of society, namely, the integrity of the family and the sufficiency of the dwelling. The family is the foundation of everything,—the root out of which the social world grows. Break it up, and you have as certainly introduced a corrupting poison into the framework of the community, as if you had inoculated the human frame with a deadly and malignant agent, that destroys the very issues of life. The whole of our factory system where women are employed is merely a systematic destruction of the family,— practical socialism, in fact, which prepares the way for theoretic socialism of the direst and most disastrous tendency, atheistic and material, without natural affection, without law, without order, without the thousand amenities of domestic life. It matters little whether the women are employed

as married, or only as unmarried. If married women are engaged in factory works, they, of course, neglect their children, who, between the period of childhood and that of labour, have the education of the public streets, with its unconcealed vice, its oaths and curses, its idleness and its vagabondism. We have only to go into our streets in the lower quarters of any of our towns, to be painfully assured that every one is a broad road to destruction for the young, and that no mere school-education can ever effectually compete with the force of evil habit, any more than wholesome food will effectually nourish those who dwell continually in a polluted atmosphere. We are all aware that the decent portion of our country population look with absolute horror on the habitual circumstances of a town life. And why so? Is it not because in their country dwellings they have been accustomed to the sacred integrity of the family, and that their isolated cottage was a home, containing father, mother, and children; God's first institute,-a family? The cottage may be small, ill-thatched, ill-ventilated, ill-floored, and smoky; it may have its dubs, its puddles, and its national midden; it may be high up on a hill, where winter blasts and winter snows are more familiar than blue skies or green fields; or it may be down in a glen, miles away from other mortal habitation,— so solitary, that every stranger who appears is a spectacle and amazement to the children. No matter wherever or whatever it may be, it is a home, and contains a family, every member of which would look with instinctive horror at the indiscriminate sort of existence common in many of our towns. Thanks to the bothy system, however, this feeling of family sacredness is beginning to be eradicated out of even our rural population; and perhaps in time a certain portion of our peasantry may be duly brought to believe that the family is a superfluous invention, after which they will be fit for anything, and good for nothing. The same principle pervades

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