of no use whatever; and that six penny-worth of postage stamps might have covered the expense of all really required communications. In due season our deputationists return home to report their no-progress in the important affair confided to their zeal and ability, looking very fat and rosy, and presenting London dresses of the latest fashion to their wives and daughters. The epilogue consists of an uncommonly long bill, in which the items of expenditure are thrown into gigantic generalities, not seeking the support of vulgar vouchers. A discontented discussion takes place on the motion for payment, in which some disappointed candidate for a trip to London is more than usually sarcastic and chary of the public funds. But the bill is eventually ordered to be paid in full, out of revenues raised by compulsory assessment; and if the deputation-monger is up to his trade, he has another visit to London on the anvil, before he gets the treasurer's cheque cashed at the bank. Now we think it high time that this costly nonsense should receive a salutary stop. What is the use of members of Parliament if they cannot contrive to do the public business of their constituents? Why should straitened payers of municipal taxes, for example, be saddled with extra imposts to defray the wasteful mummery of deputations, who, at the very best, cannot accomplish more than a judicious correspondence would to a certainty obtain? Our doctrine is that all public services should be liberally rewarded; but it is monstrous that public money should be squandered on such transparent humbugs as needless deputations.

THE SABBATH-DAY'S RESPITE FROM POST-OFFICE LABOUR.

WE are quite ready to confess that we took the slightest possible portion of interest in the agitation against Sunday labour being partially introduced in the London General Post-office. We do not yield to any people breathing in reverential regard for the sanctity and privilege of the Christian Sabbath, but we must candidly acknowledge that we were unable to discern how the vital interests of religion were so importantly helped or hindered by the absence or attendance of a few clerks and letter-sorters at St Martin's-le-Grand for some hours on the Sunday. So very differently did we view the subject, that we merely considered it as the first step towards breaking up a metropolitan monopoly of postoffice ease, which was enjoyed at the expense of all the rest of the empire. For what was the naked truth of the case? Why, that London should be piously prohibited from sending or receiving letters on the Sunday, but that every Post-office functionary elsewhere should, on that day of rest, be harassed with a full amount

of duty, in order that the Londoners might have their week-day correspondence poured in from the most distant points with unfailing abundance! All reverence, all repose, all comfort, were to be sacrificed in every other quarter, for the purpose of giving to London a sham religious repute, coupled with incessant activity in the provinces, to make up for one day's London suspension of intercourse. Therefore, we were unable to participate in the religious fervour which inspired so much movement against Sabbath desecration, as it was emphatically termed. We could not for the life of us detect more in the new Post-office arrangement than a stop put to some country excursions and suburban pic-nics, on the part of a score or two of subordinates who were called on to carry out a crotchet of Rowland Hill, the penny postage schemer. If we were to credit the strong statements of many zealous declaimers, the whole cause of national religion was wrapped up in this petty Post-office regulation; but, much as we felt inclined to appreciate the motives of well-intentioned men, we scrupled to give in our adhesion to.their somewhat extravagant doctrine. In short, we saw distinctly that pietists were unconsciously transformed into London Post-office protectionists, and that the earnest arguments urged in behalf of the privileged officials in the great British Babylon were virtual pleadings against the just rights of innumerable other Post-office people, whose bondage and Sunday travail were still to be perpetuated. But we lift up our voice to promote a measure of universal equity, which shall embrace the rightful rest of all servants of the state employed in the Postoffice department. We are not sticklers for suspended work in the London district and ceaseless toil in every other region where a Post-office is planted. We allege that Post-office labour on the Sabbath is a direct breach of the law of the land, and that it can no more be justified than any other infringement. There is not, so far as we are aware, any special statute which secures the Sunday leisure of the London Post-office; it is simply by following out the course of general law that the Postmaster-General and his staff stay at home on the Sabbath, or enjoy themselves elsewhere, while the multitude of provincial postmasters must fag at their office windows to hand out letters to inquirers. Here, therefore, is the monstrous injustice and inequality which we are eager to denounce. All paltry, partial shifts and expedients will prove utterly fruitless in this matter. The evil is, that a public department sectionally shut up on the Sunday in London, is open for business purposes on the same sacred day throughout the empire. What an absurd and unjust anomaly is this! Cannot country folks do for one day without posted letters or newspapers, as the London millions have hitherto done? and cannot Londoners and

R

ruralists forecast their communications so as to effect every legitimate interchange which pleasure prompts or business demands? If the government had enough of firmness and wisdom to issue a plain order to keep all Post-offices closed on the Sabbath, the social system of the whole empire would instantly accommodate itself to the previously announced change, and an immense weight of oppression would be removed not only from Post-office employes, but from clerks, servants, and other messengers, who besiege the country Post-offices in order to receive their respective packets of letters and newspapers.

While on the subject of Post-office management, we may observe that a good deal of nonsense has been spouted at public meetings as to the presumed ill effect of Sunday labour in producing theft and embezzlement in the Post-office department." We apprehend that the cause of Post-office peccadillos of this unseemly sort is more traceable in the fact that the public department, which offers the greatest temptations to theft, is, if we are rightly informed, the worst paid department of Her Majesty's service. No one will enter into it who has decent expectations elsewhere, and the consequence is that the London office is crowded with an inferior class of men, whose poor positions are obtained through the lowest electioneering influences. This has been always the state of things; but the penny postage project has still further degraded the Post-office. Whilst the revenue has been diminished, so as to leave a mere nominal surplus, the duties of the entire Post-office department are intolerably increased. We say intolerably, because men cannot be expected to bear with equanimity that great additional labour should be imposed upon them, and that their recompense should remain unaugmented. Now mark how this boon to the letter-writing public acts upon menials in the Post-office. Their drudgery is excessive; for Mr Rowland Hill's grand notion of economically working out his system is to make one miserable man do the work of two! They toil, and toil, and toil; no adequate reward awaits their extra exertions, and they feel at once the weight of undue labour and the pressure of poverty. Every man of them has treasures passing hourly under his thumb, and he purloins transmitted monies instead of forwarding them to their lawful destination. If his theft be untracked, while he labours under suspicion, the authorities resort to the questionable trick of filling a letter with marked money, and thus hunting home the conjectured delinquent. The police reports teem with these things; but Lord Clanricarde has not enlargement of mind to understand what they denote. They show that the public are robbed, because the public service is confided to ill-paid labourers of a low caste; and the real remedy consists in selecting proper persons to perform responsible duties,

bearing in mind a Scripture truth, as applicable to clerks, and letter-sorters, and letter-carriers, as to Postmasters-General; viz., that the labourer is worthy of his hire.

The public expect and exact marvels of probity and punctuality from the Post-office; but although their brazen idol Rowland Hill succeeded in demolishing the Post-office revenue, he will never succeed in securing post-office probity by means of his niggardly system towards the oppressed officials of that ill-administered department. Indeed, we always thought Mr Hill a shallow, inefficient pretender, a penny wise panderer to the covetousness of traders, but cloaking his scheme with the pretext of vast public benefit. Either of two things must shortly take place; a moderate augmentation of postage rates, or some other impost, must be devised to eke out the required expenditure of the Post-office; for the present revenue cannot possibly suffice for the due remuneration of respectable persons fitted to perform the onerous and responsible duties of the department.

THE PRESENT STATE OF IRELAND.

[The renewed failure of the potato in Ireland, having again given rise to the identical state of things which drew forth the following strictures; they are presently reprinted, in order to shew that the pertinacity in pushing the culture of the doomed potato will continue to inflict wide-spread calamity upon the peasant population of the sister island].

Ireland, Sir Robert Peel's "difficulty," and the perpetual field for political paradox, is again distressingly obtruded upon public attention. The London journalists, ensconced in their snug editorial chambers, are, after a short lull, busily employed in getting up for their excitable readers, a fresh supply of conspiracies and rebellions in Ireland, as a sort of equipoise to the Bermondsey murder. The Times rolls its theatrical thunder, affects to know everything better than everybody, and is, by common consent, the "Sir Oracle," with all the priesthood of the press. A crowd of scribbling senators-"the mob of gentlemen who write with ease" —are also in full trot throughout Ireland, inditing sundry epistles on the present, past, and future condition of "that unhappy country," and favouring the public with reams of equivocal information, and confident prediction. S. G. O.; Poulet Scrope, M.P.; the corn-leaguer, Bright; and Carlyle, the concocter of EnglishGerman crudities, are all engaged, pen in hand, scouring through the sufferings of the green isle, and preparing to cheer our winter evenings with the most contradictory statements of Irish horre

We smile at these tourists and their productions, for we know practically, that the bulk of English enquirers return from Ireland just as they went, so far as relates to truthful, useful information. The mere outside of things-the beggar, the hovel, and the bog-they, of course, peer at through the broken sash of a rickety post-chaise but as for the social state of Ireland, it is a hidden mystery to all these well-meaning, but utterly unqualified investigators, who can do little good, save by encouraging road-side inns, and tossing occasional sixpences to eloquent mendicants.

Lest we should travel in the tracks of the writers whose authority we hold so cheap, we must eschew preliminary disquisition, and enter at once upon the present state of Ireland. In flat opposition to the potentates of the London press, we boldly affirm that neither politics nor religion have any share whatever in the existing commotions. Neither can it be justly said that the present rural disturbances are a renewal of the old system, designated as agrarian outrages." Fanatics, whether of the Roman Catholic or Protestant creed-agitators, whether for repeal or rebellion— have no place in the actual, pervading, tumultuary violence which now afflicts many parts of Ireland-their "occupation's gone.' The parties now in deadly conflict are the landlords and tenants of Ireland, and the battle-plains are the harvest fields covered with grain, on which the life of the combatants may be truly said to depend. The potato blight having again unmistakeably visited the sole subsistence of the peasant population, it follows, that if the whole crop of corn be seized on by the landlords, the working producers of that crop must infallibly perish. This is no exaggeration, it is the plain, awful truth. During long years a false and pernicious agricultural system prevailed in Ireland; for the inconsiderate owners of the soil exacted, in the shape of rent, the whole amount of the corn crops, wringing from the wretched peasant the entire produce of the land, minus his daily potato. The proprietor lived lavishly-kept his pack of hounds-sported racehorses on the Curragh-saddled his estate with judgment debtsand parried his creditors with a roll of rack-rented tenants. These miserable tenants, huddled in mud cabins-for the thatch of which landlords would not even spare straw-without any of the comforts which would serve to fill up the barbarous blank of savage existence-the crushed, yet struggling cultivators of the ground in Ireland, were indisputably in a more abject position than any tillers of the soil throughout Europe. "All the fault of the idle, dirty, intractable peasantry," exclaim the unanimous host of absentee proprietors and resident exactors of rent. But not so, worshipful lords and gentlemen. How came you to think that the whole produce of the soil, with the exception of an esculent divided among tenants and their swine, was meant for You? Did it never occur