which no amount of even right principle among them will ever form an adequate compensation. There is, we believe, no part of her Majesty's dominions in which there is more right principle than in the Highlands of Scotland; but, from causes which it might be a mournful, but certainly no uninstructive task to trace, their people possess the working habit and ability in a comparatively small degree; and so they can do exceedingly little for the propagation of the principles which they hold, and, when disease touches the root of the potato, they find themselves in circumstances in which, save for the charity of their neighbours, they would perish. Principle, even when held truly and in sincerity, as among many of our poor Highlanders, is not enough of itself; and the mere teaching of principle in early life, in lessons which may or may not be received efficiently and in truth, must of itself be still less sufficient. Even if the best Churches in the country had the country's vagabond and pauper children subject to their instruction,-supposing the thing possible, though, of course, if the Churches did not feed them, it is not; and supposing, further, that they turned them out on society, the course completed, destitute of industrial habits or skill,-what would be the infallible result? The few converted to God by a vital change of heart,—and in all ages of the Church the numbers of such have been proportionably few, would no doubt either struggle on blamelessly through life, or, sinking in the hard contest, would resign life rather than sustain it by the fruits of a course of crime; but the great bulk of the others would live as paupers or criminals: they would be simply better instructed vagabonds than if they had been worse taught. The welfare of a country has two foundations. Right principle is the one; and the other, and scarce less important foundation, is industrial habit combined with useful skill. And in order to obviate the great danger of permitting juvenile paupers to grow up into

adult paupers and criminals, it is essentially necessary that the skill should be communicated to them, and the habits formed in them. And hence the importance of the scheme that, by finding regular employment for the youthful paupers of the country, would rear them up in honest industrial habits, and thus qualify them for being useful members of society.

It has been alleged against Presbyterianism by excellent men of the English Church,-among the rest, by Thomas Scott the commentator,—that in its history in the past it has been by much too political, and has busied itself too engrossingly with national affairs. There can be little doubt that its history during the seventeenth and the latter half of the sixteenth century is very much that of Scotland. Presbyterianism was political in these days, and fought the battles of civil as certainly as those of religious liberty. During a considerable part of the eighteenth century it was not political. From the suppression of the Rebellion of 1745 to the breaking out of the great revolutionary war, the life led by the Scottish people was an exceedingly quiet one, and there were no exigencies in their circumstances important enough to make large demands on the exertions of the patriot or the ingenuity of the political economist. The people of the empire rather fell short than exceeded its resources, and were somewhat less than sufficient to carry on its operations of agriculture and trade; and hence the comfortable doctrine of Goldsmith and Smollett regarding population,-a comfortable doctrine, for it never can obtain save when a nation is in comfortable circumstances. The best proof of the welfare of a country, they said, was the greatness of its population. It was unnecessary in such an age that Presbyterianism should be political. The pauperism which had deluged Scotland immediately after the Revolution had been all absorbed; the people, in at least the Lowlands, were a people of good

working habits; and in the Highlands little work served; and all that had to be done by such of the ministers of religion in the country as were worthy of the name was to exert themselves in adding right principle and belief in relation to the realities of the unseen world, to the right habits in relation to the present one that had already been formed among the people of their charges. But with the revolutionary war and the present century the state of matters greatly altered. Pauperism began mightily to increase; the recesses of our large towns, that some forty or fifty years before had used to pour out to the churches, at the sound of the Sabbathbells, a moral and religious population, became the foul dens in which a worse than heathen canaille festered in poverty and ignorance; habits of intemperance had increased twentyfold among the masses; the young were growing up by thousands in habits of idleness and crime, to contaminate the future; even the better people, placed with their children in perilous juxtaposition with the thoroughly vitiated, were in the circumstances of men in health located per force in the fever-ward of an hospital. The Scottish Highlanders, too, ruined by the clearing system, had come to be in circumstances greatly different from those of their fathers; and it had grown once more necessary that the Presbyterian minister should, like his predecessors of the sixteenth century, interest himself in a class of secular questions that are shown by experience to be as clearly allied to spiritual ones as the body is to the soul. The one great name specially connected with this altered state of things, and the course of action which it demands, is that of Chalmers,-Chalmers, the true type and exemplar of the Presbyterian minister as specially suited to the exigencies of the time. But there are other names. The late Dr Duncan with his savings banks, Guthrie with his ragged schools, Begg and Mackenzie with their dwellings for the working-classes, Tasker in his West Port

labouring in the footsteps of his friend the great deceased, must be regarded as true successors of those Presbyterian ministers of the seventeenth century who identified themselves with their people in all their interests, and were as certainly good patriots as sound divines. And there are signs in the horizon that their example is to become general. We have scarce met a single Highland minister for the last three or four years, especially those of the North-Western Highlands, who did not ask, however hopeless of an answer, "What is to be done with our poor people ?" The question indicates an awakening to the inevitable necessity of inquiry and exertion in other fields than the purely theological one; and one of these, in both Lowlands and Highlands, is that in which Chalmers so long laboured. The case of the poor must be wisely considered, or there will rest no blessing on the exertions of the Churches.

But we must bring our remarks to a close; and we would do so by citing an instance, only too lamentably obvious at the present time, of how very much in our mixed state of existence, as creatures composed of soul and body, a purely physical event may affect the religious interests of a great empire. The potato disease was a thing purely physical. It seemed to have nothing of the nature of a missionary society about it; it did not engage missionaries, nor appoint committees, nor hire committee-rooms, nor hold meetings; and it seemed to have as little favour for Popish priests as for Episcopalian curates or Presbyterian ministers. And yet, by pressing out the Popish population of Ireland on every side, and surcharging with them the large towns of England, Scotland, and the United States, it has done more in some three or four years for the spread of Popery in Britain and America, than all the missionary societies of all the evangelistic Churches of the world have done for the spread of Protestantism during the last half-century. He must be an

obtuse man who fails to see, with such an example before him, how intimately associated with the ecclesiastical the secular may be.-November 2, 1850.

THE CRIME-MAKING LAWS.

If there was a special law enacted against all red-haired men, and all men six feet high, red-haired men and men six feet high would in a short time become exceedingly dangerous characters. In order to render them greatly worse than their neighbours, there would be nothing more necessary than simply to set them beyond the pale of the constitution, by providing by statute, that whoever lodged informations against red-haired men or men six feet high should be handsomely rewarded, and that the culprits themselves should be lodged in prison, and kept at hard labour, on every conviction, from a fortnight to sixty days. The country would at length come to groan under the intolerable burden of its red-haired men and its men six feet high. There would be frequent paragraphs in our columns and elsewhere, to the effect that some three or four respectable white-haired gentlemen, varying in height from five feet nothing to five feet five, had been grievously maltreated in laudably attempting to apprehend some formidable felon, habit and repute six feet high; or to the effect that Constable D of the third division had been barbarously murdered by a red-haired ruffian. Philosophers would come to discover, that so deeply implanted was the bias to outrage and wrong in red-haired nature, that it held by the scoundrels even after their heads had become bald and their whiskers gray; and that so inherent was ruffianism to six-feet-highism, that though four six-feet fellows had, for