hand. We agree altogether in the tone of following remarks from the pen of our first and most genial political economist:

"I cannot regard a stationary state of capital and wealth, with the unaffected version manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or any thing but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The northern and midddle states of America are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favourable circumstances; having apparently got rid of all social injustices and inequalities that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of chartism, and they have no poverty; and all that these advantages seem as yet to have done for them (notwithstanding some incipient signs of a better tendency) is, that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters. This is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in realizing. Most fitting indeed is it, that while riches are power, and to grow as rich as possible, the universal object of ambition, the path to its attainment should be open to all, without favour or partiality. But the best state for human nature, is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

a proportion of the national energy still devoted to mere material acquisition, still labouring in a field in which such ample harvests have been already gained, till pushing on in a direction where there is little left to win,while so many social problems remain still unsolved, so many grievous wounds still unhealed, so many noble paths still unfrequented or unexplored. We still press madly forward in the race, though the goal can present us with no new attractions; we still struggle "to get on," though we have got far enough to command all the substantial acquisitions and enjoyments of a worthy life; we still persist in striving and toiling for added weaith, which can purchase for us no added happiness, and in the hot conpedition we push aside or trample down many who really need what we only desire. New roads, vaster ships, more rapid and cheaper locomotion, speedier transmission of intelligence, greater physical comforts,-all these are valuable things, and objects of legitimate exertion. But of these we have now almost enough; we have pushed on long enough and far enough in this exclusive line; there are other fields to be tilled, other harvests to be reaped, other aims to be achieved. Thousands and thousands of course must, till some blessed change comes over our social state, spend life in striving for a living, and thousands more must concentrate all their exertions on the acquirement of a competence; but why should this competence be made, by our increasing luxuriousness, an ever vanishing point? And why should those on whom no such hard necessity is laid, imitate their needier brethren? Why should not those who have a fortune sufficient to supply all reasonable wants, and to guarantee them against anxious cares, pause awhile upon the dusty and weary thoroughfare, and try to form a juster estimate of the purpose of life, and the relative value of its aims and prizes? Why should we so cling to the undoubted but fragmentary truth that enjoyment lies only in the race, in the contest, in the effort? The successful barrister at the summit of his profession and the height of fame, is so overwhelmed with business that he has time neither for sleep, nor society, nor recreation, nor literature; his strength is overtasked, his life is slipping away; he has not even leisure for the sweet amenities of the domestic circle; he is amassing thousands which he does not want and cannot spend; he is engrossing briefs which poor men thirst for in vain;yet when does he ever resign a portion of his business to hungry competitors? when does It is indeed a sad spectacle, that of so vast toil and less emolument? When does he ever he ever resolve upon "shorter hours,"-less

"That the energies of mankind should be kept in employment by the struggle for riches, as they were formerly by the struggle of war, until the better minds succeed in educating the others to better things, is undoubtedly more desirable than that they should rust and stagnate. While minds are coarse, they require coarse stimuli; and let them have them. In the meantime, those who do not accept the present very early stage of human improvement as its ultimate type, may be excused for being comparatively indifferent to the mere increase of production and accumulation. I know not why it should be a matter of congratulation, that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure, except as representatives of wealth; or that numbers of individuals should pass over every year from the middle class into a richer class, or from the class of the occupied rich into that of the unoccupied."

"*

Mill's Pol. Econ., ii, 318.-3d Ed.

say to himself"I will no longer spent my labour for that which is not bread, and for the

tent and intellectual serenity; less of a mad | gallop, and more of a quite progress; less of a dusty race-course, and more of a cultivated garden; less of a career which disgusts us in our hours of weariness, and sickens us in our moments of reflection, and more of one which we can enjoy while we read it, and look back upon without shame and regret when it is

closed.

Need we fear that the world would stagnate under such a change? Need we guard ourselves against the misconstruction of being held to recommend a life of complacent and inglorious inaction? We think not. We

would only substitute a nobler for a meaner strife-a rational for an excessive toil-an en

joyment that springs from serenity, for one that springs from excitement only; we would enable our countrymen to find happiness in contemplation as well as in action. To each time its own preacher, to each excess its own counteraction. In an age of dissipation, langour, and stagnation, we should join with Mr. Carlyle in preaching the "Evangel of Work," and say with him blessed is the man who has found his work, let him ask no other blessedness."* In an age of strenuous, phrenzied, feverish, excessive, and often utterly irrational and objectless exertion, we join Mr. Mill, in preaching the milder and more needed Evangel of Leisure."

"The worth of work does not surely consist in its leading to other work, and so on to work upon work without end. On the contrary, the multiplication of work, for purposes not worth caring about, is one of the evils of our present condition. When justice and reason shall be the rule of human affairs, one of the first things to which we may expect them to be applied is the question: -How many of the so called luxuries, conveniences, refinements, and ornaments of life, are worth the labor which must be undergone as the condition of producing them? The beautifying of existence is as worthy and useful an object as the sustaining of it; but only a vitiated taste can see any such result in those fopperies of so called civilization, which myriads of hands are now occupied and lives wasted in providing. In opposition to the "Gospel of Work," I would assert the Gospel of Leisure, and maintain that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labor.... To reduce very greatly the quantity of work required to carry on existence, is as needful as to distribute it more equally; and the progress of

* "Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil Complain not: Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow-workmen there in God's eternity, surviving there, they alone surviving, sacred band of the immortals, celestial body-guard of the Empire of mankind. Ever in the weak human memory, they survive so long as saints, as heroes, as gods, they alone surviving; peopling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes of time."-PAST AND PRESENT.

The second point in which it appears to us that continental life has greatly the advantage over our own, is in the aspect which poverty assumes. Rarely in France and Germany does it sink so low as with us.

Far more seldom does it reach the form of

destitution. Scarcely ever does it descend to
squalor. Many causes combine to produce
this enviable difference; sometimes it is pur-
chased at a price which we are not prepared
chased at a price which we are not prepared
to pay; but of the fact of the difference there
can, we believe, be no question. We all
know how incessantly of late years our sym-
pathies have been aroused, and our feelings
shocked and pained by pictures of the awful
depths to which misery descends in the courts
and alleys of our great metropolis, as well as
of Edinburgh and Glasgow; of human beings
living by hundreds in dens filthier than styes,
and more pestilential than plague hospitals;
of men, women, and children huddled to-
gether in dirt, disorder, and promiscuity like
that of the lower animals; of girls delicately
bred, toiling day and night for wages utterly
inadequate to the barest maintenance; of
deaths from long insufficiency of food; of
deaths from absolute starvation. We are
not prepared to indorse the heart-rending
and sickening delineations of Mayhew, Kings-
ley, and Dickens, in all their details, but
neither are we able to withhold our assent to
their rough and general fidelity. They are
too far confirmed by the cold official state-
ments of blue books for that. Poverty, then,
in Great Britain assumes many and frequent
forms of aggravated wretchedness and squa-
lor, which change its character from a condi-
tion of privation to one of positive infliction,
which make life a burden, a malady, and a
curse. In France and Germany, we believe
we are warranted in stating, these abysses of
misery are never found-or only as anomal-
ous and most astounding exceptions. We
never hear of them in Vienna. We believe
they could not exist there. There is nothing
like them in Munich, Dresden, or Berlin. Sir
Francis Head and Lord Ashley put them-
selves in the hands of an experienced resident
in Paris with a request that they might be
taken to the very worst haunts and dwellings
of the lowest portion of the population, and
this is the testimony Sir F. Head gives :-

I must own it was my impression, and I believe it was that of Lord Ashley, that the poverty

we had come to witness bore no comparison | most of the class with us, but still leading whatever to that recklessness of personal ap generally a more decent, worthy, satisfacpearance, that abject wretchedness, that squalid misery, which-dressed in the cast-off tattered garments of our wealthy classes, and in clothes perforated with holes not to be seen among the most savage tribes-Ireland annually pours out upon England, and which, in the crowded courts and alleys of London I have so often visited, produce among our own people, as it were, by infection which no moral remedy has yet been able to cure, scenes not only revolting as well as dis

tory, social existence; their peasants are more contented, better-mannered, less boorish, and (when unexcited) less brutal, and more comfortable, though often with fewer of the raw materials of comfort; their artisans are steadier, soberer, more cheerful, more saving, and more sensible than ours; and even their very poor, destitute, and forlorn are less wretched, less squalid, less absolutely abancreditable to human nature, but which are to be doned and despairing than ours.* Why is witnessed in no other portion, civilized or uncivilized, on the globe. In another this? And when we thus come to the relocality, La Petite Pologne, we found the general sults of our opposite notions and proceedings condition of the poorer classes in no way worse in matters of social policy, is there not reason than those we had just left. On entering a large to suspect that, even if the ultimate and house, four stories high, running round a small average verdict be given in our favour, we square hollow court, we ascertained that it contained rather more than 500 lodgers, usually may not be so wholly right nor our neighbours so wholly wrong as it has hitherto grouped together in families or little communities. In this barrack or warren, the rooms, paved with pleased us to imagine. There must surely be bricks, were about fifteen feet long, ten feet something good and imitable in a system unbroad, and eight feet high. We found them der which, while there is more poverty, misery generally speaking, clean and well ventilated, but is less frequent and less extreme than in our the charge for each chamber unfurnished was free, prosperous, and energetic land.

six francs a month. In the most One of the causes which contribute to this miserable district in the west end of Paris, we also failed to meet with anything that could be superiority, in Germany at least, we have alsaid to add opprobrium to poverty. The inha- ready incidentally noticed, and we shall pass bitants of the few houses we entered were, no it over the more briefly as it is of a nature doubt, existing upon very scanty subsistence, but which we could not imitate or approach. We in every case they appeared anxious to preserve allude to the care taken by the governments polite manners and to be clean in their dress. In of central Europe that there should be a callthe Rue de la Roche, No. 2, we entered a lodging, an opening, a mode of livelihood for ing-house, kept by a clean, pleasing-mannered woman, and as all her lodgers were out at work we walked over her establishment. The rooms

which were about eight feet seven inches in height contained, nearly touching each other, from three to five double beds; for each of which she charged ten sous a night, or 24d, for each sleeper, (in London the charge is usually 4d.) Each room had one window, and we found every one wide open."-Head's Fagots of French Sticks, i. 114

118.

every one of their citizens as he reaches man-
hood-a
-a place at life's banquet in short, to use
Malthus's illustration. They take vigilant
cognizance of each man's means of support,
and do not allow him to marry till these
means are reasonably adequate. In Norway,
no one can marry without "shewing, to the

* Even classes like the "distressed needle women" seem far less miserable in Paris than in London.

Compare the follo ing from "Un Philosophe sous les toits," with the harrowing pictures given us in "Margaret," "Alton Locke," and "Realities:"

Now, when we remember that England is beyond comparison richer than these Continental States, and that the earnings of our "Je me suis trouvé dans un wagon près des deux labouring classes are far higher than those of the same classes either in France or Germany Parisiens casaniers et paisibles dont j'ai parlé plus sœurs déjà sur le retour, appartenant à la classe des -higher even in reference to the price of the haut. Quelques complaisances de bon voisinage ont necessaries of life; and that we are accus- suffi pour m'attirer leur confiance; au bout de tomed to regard ourselves as standing at the quelques minutes je savais toute leur histoire. "Ce sont deux pauvres filles restées orphelines à head of European civilisation, and as having quinze ans, et qui, depuis, ont vécu comme vivent les pursued a more enlightened social policy than femmes qui travaillent, d'économie et de privation. other nations; there is much in the contrast Fabriquant depuis vingt ou trente ans des agraffes we have noticed that should startle us into pour la même maison, elles ont vu dix maîtres s'y inquiry and reflection. What are the causes succéder et s'enricher, sans que rien ait changé dans leur sort. Elles habitent toujours la même chambre, of a phenomenon so painful and discreditable au fond d'une de ces impasses de la rue St. Denis to us? As a general rule the labouring poor où l'air et le soleil sont inconnus. Elles se mettent abroad are more respectable in their character au travail avant le jour, le prolongent après la nuit, and mode of life than their analoga in Eng-et voient les années se joindre aux années sans que land-not certainly cleverer, not better work- que l'office du dimanche, une promenade ou une leur vie ait été marquée par aucun autre évènement men, not made of more sterling stuff, than maladie."

*

-a sum

satisfaction of the clergyman, that he is per- | country, may not only do much to account manently settled in such a manner as to offer for whatever is peculiarly afflicting and disa fair prospect that he can support a family." reputable in the condition of our poor, but is In Mecklenburg, marriages are delayed by the the one main reason why, in spite of our geconscription in the twenty-second year, and neral prosperity, this class has not risen to a by military service for six years, besides which height of comfort, ease, and opulence unpathe parties must have a dwelling, without ralleled in the old world. As is well known, which the clergyman is not allowed to marry our working classes yearly waste in the purely them. In Saxony, "a man may not marry mischievous enjoyments of the palate a sum before he is twenty-one, if liable to serve in equal to the whole Imperial revenue, the army. In Dresden, artisans may not which, if suffered to accumulate, would soon marry till they have become masters in their render them capitalists; if invested in annuiIn Wurtemburg and Bavaria, (be- ties or savings' banks, would secure them sides being obliged to remain single till the against the day of reverse or incapacity; if termination of the period fixed for military judiciously expended, would raise them at service.) no man may marry without per- once to a condition of comfort, respectability, mission, and that permission is only granted even of luxury, and if they desired it, of comon proving that he and his wife have between parative leisure. A cessation of this expendithem sufficient to establish themselves and ture would be equivalent to raising the earnmaintain a family-say from 800 to 1000 ings of every poor man's family throughout florins in large towns; 400 to 500 in smaller Great Britain, by £10 a year, or four shillings ones; and in villages 200 florins, or about a week. But this would be the smallest por£16." In Lubeck, Frankfort, and many Can- tion of the saving. The whole habits and tons of Switzerland, similar regulations are in mode of life of the individual would be regeforce.* It is difficult to say that there is any- nerated. The home would become happy; thing in them which is inconsistent with jus- the whole domestic circle would be a scene of tice or a fitting amount of social freedom, peace instead of strife. There would be few since the universal and tacit custom in mo- filthy dwellings, few neglected children, few dern civilized states of compelling the com- of those scandalous cases of wives half-murmunity to maintain those who cannot main- dered by their drunken husbands, which now tain themselves, certainly implies and in- disgrace every police court in our cities. It volves a correlative right on the part of is imposible to overcolour or exaggerate the the community to watch that the number of change which that one circumstance would these public burdens shall not be selfishly or make. All who have had to do with the poor wantonly augmented;—and after all, these know how directly, how inevitably, how raregulations only impose by law upon the poor pidly, a habit of drinking, yielded to by the the restrictions which the middle and upper head of the family, changes poverty into deranks by habit, and voluntarily, impose upon stitution, stinted means into squalid wretchedthemselves. But these restrictions are too ness, a home into a den. The French artisan foreign to our national notions to be adopted comparatively seldom gives way to this dreadhere as externally imposed fetters: all that ful vice, and seldom, therefore, incurs the sorcan be hoped for is that in time our labouring did misery which is its invariable consequence. classes may become enlightened enough to He is often, generally, much poorer than his assume them of their own free will, as they English brother; his fare is scantier; his become conscious of the beneficial effect they house is smaller; his bed is harder; but he could not fail to produce on their condition, rarely aggravates these privations gratuitously and cognizant of the general though moderate by sensual indulgence; seldomer still does he and monotonous wellbeing which they are in- cast these privations on his wife and children, strumental in diffusing among the inhabitants while living in wasteful intemperance himself. of central Europe.

A second cause, and perhaps the most frequent and the most powerful of all, in producing the contrast we have noticed in the aspect of French and English poverty, is the more habitual sobriety of the labouring class on the other side of the Channel. The vice of intemperance, or where it does not reach that point, the custom of indulgence in spirituous liquors, so unhappily prevalent in our

But connected with this greater sobriety, and operating in the same direction, is another cause of the superiority of the French poor man. He is by no means always better educated, but he has nearly always, whether from nature or training, a degree of taste and imagination of which our poor are sadly destitute. These qualities give him, in however straitened circumstances he may be, a fondness for the embellishments and amenities

* Mr. Porter has shown that this amount cannot be less than £54,000,000 per annum.