use of the superior houses themselves. Every establishment so conducted becomes the centre of a healthy infection; a higher standard is raised, and people expect a better entertainment as the fruit of their money's worth. Not long ago the keeper of one large and thoroughly abominable tenement assailed the Inspector with a volley of imprecations. You have ruined me,' he said, with your vile building there; since you opened that house of yours, I have been obliged to spend more than four hundred pounds in painting and cleaning!'

But the Society, in their second effort, attempted greater things, and determined to raise a new house from the foundation, constructed on the best plan, as a model for future establishments. They selected a site in George Street, Bloomsbury, in the neighbourhood of Church Lane, and other streets and alleys of the same Elysian description. Here they have erected a spacious, airy building, calculated to hold one hundred men and boys-firebrands, we hope, plucked from the fire of the general corruption. The system and rules of this Refuge are almost a transcript of those laid down for the management of the original houses. The main difference lies in the superior accommodation. It consists of five stories besides the kitchen-floor; the staircases are wide, well lighted, and of stone; gas is supplied to all parts of the edifice, being put on and turned off at fixed hours, according to the season. One of the lower apartments is assigned to the lodgers as a store-closet; each person having a small provisionsafe to himself, fronted with a plate of pierced zinc, which he keeps under lock and key-the room looks like a luggage-train of rabbit-hutches. The dormitories each contain no more than thirteen single beds; and each bed, with a narrow pathway at its side, is separated from the adjoining one by a high wooden partition, and approached by a private door from a common passage down the centre. In this small compartiment are a bed, a chair, and wooden box for clothes and other valuables,—and to this contracted but comfortable recess the tenant can withdraw himself, and enjoy an hour of retirement-a privilege as salutary to the poor as to the rich, but alas! rarely attainable in any walk of humble life. The advantage, we know, is most highly valued. On each floor are rooms with zinc basons and a full supply of water for personal cleanliness, and every other convenience; and below is a spacious laundry where the inmates may wash their linen-tubs, hot water, and drying-closets are provided. The use of these comforts, including salt, soap, towels, and a small library, is charged at the rate of fourpence a-night for every night in the week. This is an increase of fourpence on the weekly payments of the other houses-an increase, how

ever, very cheerfully paid, and very moderate in reference to the advantages obtained; it was rendered necessary, we may add, by the price of the land. The fruits of this establishment have been as happy as those of the others. We beseech any one who may entertain a doubt, to visit the house about eight o'clock in the evening, observe the arrangements, and converse with the inmates.

It need hardly be observed that if the Society can afford, and with an adequate profit, to provide all this accommodation for the price demanded at the most infamous receptacles, the gains of their proprietors must be really enormous. By way of specimen, we were informed by a most respectable missionary, that he knew an individual who rented a small house at 117. 14s. a-year. The man put into it eighteen double beds, which brought in 21. 8s. a-week, or 1247. 16s. per annum. If 137. 2s. be allowed for necessary expenses, a yearly profit of 1007. would remain on this paltry tenement. Another missionary reported: One of the lodging-house keepers in my district told me that he came to London a journeyman-carpenter with only five shillings in his pocket, and now he could lay his hands any day on ten thousand pounds.' In fact, we are assured that many of the proprietors, hiring out such houses by the dozen, are men of notorious wealth, and live in what the worthy missionaries describe as 'great splendour' in different parts of London.

The model-house in George Street is the only one that has been raised from the foundation for this special purpose; but there are already in London several other good lodging-houses, not belonging to the Labourers' Friend Society, but copied from theirs. We may mention an establishment in St. Peter's, Westminster, and another, for females, in Newton Street, Holborn, under the care, and at the charge, of the London City Mission. The system, too, has found its imitators in the provinces. At Birkenhead the spirited proprietors have constructed large barracks for the reception of their work-people, but so arranged as to give to each family a separate dwelling, with every convenience that comfort and decency can require. We have also visited establishments at Glasgow and Edinburgh-in both of which towns the necessity of such refuges is as great as in London; they are small and imperfect as yet; but we hail the efforts as indicative of better things. In Glasgow we endeavoured to ascertain from the inmates some particulars of their history; but the native caution of the Scotchman was a match for our curiosity; and we learned but little beyond the gratifying fact that many of them were persons recently arrived in search of employment. Here, then, the establishment was meeting the very evil we mentioned

at

at the outset. In Edinburgh the hostelry is situated in the Westport; and the contrast of the past with the present use of the premises adds a peculiar interest to the experiment-for the cellars of that house were, in former days, the infamous laboratory of Burke and Hare,

Such is the outline of the domiciled condition of tens of thousands of our countrymen ; and such the progress of some efforts that have been made to improve them. Would that we might hope to be this once listened to! For we are not unacquainted with the worst vexation that awaits the investigator and publisher of social evils, —who sees the mischief growing rapidly under his eyes, yet his statements, his warnings, his entreaties, fall still-born to the earth, and earn nothing for him but the title of humanity-monger! Meanwhile ignorance or carelessness, or both together, heap one wrong upon another; every improvement in streets, squares, or approaches; every architectural clearance, prompted by taste or convenience, brings trouble to the impoverished multitude. This may be sport to us, but it is death to them.' They are driven, at a very short notice, from their humble abodes, to search in vain for other dwellings, which, in common justice, should be prepared for them at an equal charge; we have seen them in agonies of doubt, worn by fatigue, and anticipating a much increased rent for a still more miserable accommodation. They press, of course, into the densely crowded lodging-house, which, though miraculously elastic, refuses at last to receive any more. A short time ago whole troops of these ejected sufferers might be seen sitting night by night on the cold and damp staircases, arranged like flower-pots on the stands of a greenhouse!

We submit these things to the consideration of all ranks and professions-to every holder of property, whether urban or provincial. London is the fountain and head-spring of seventenths of the crime of England; the hotbed in which are conceived and ripened those deeds of fraud and violence which are afterwards perpetrated by metropolitan emissaries. This fact is established beyond a doubt by the inquiries of the Constabulary Commissioners; and it surely demands the serious reflection of all speculators, and seekers of political security, in the improved education of the people. Thus much for personal and social interests. Of others of a graver and more solid wisdom we demand, whether a state of things so awfully degrading, and yet so easily removed, should any longer be permitted to exist under the dominion of a Christian Sovereign?

ART. VII.

ART. VII.-1. Medical History of the Expedition to the Niger. By James Ormiston M William, M.D., Senior Medical Officer of the Expedition. London. 1843.

2. Is Cheap Sugar the Triumph of Free Trade? A Letter to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell. By Jacob Omnium. London. 1847.

3. Notes on Cuba. By a Physician. Boston, U. S. 1844. THE late Sir Fowell Buxton's confessions respecting the utter

failure of the proceedings of the Friends of the African' did more credit to the candour of that gentleman than to the ability and discretion of the party of which he was the acknowledged head. In the year 1840 he frankly admitted that England, after having spent at their instigation, and under their guidance, upwards of 15,000,000l. in her efforts to suppress the slave-trade, after having thereby seriously compromised her friendly relations with the powers whose subjects were engaged in that nefarious traffic, and having consigned to a premature grave thousands of her bravest sons in the performance of their professional duties on the shores of Africa, had but succeeded in aggravating the sufferings of the unhappy beings whom she sought to relieve. It is not our purpose in the present paper to saturate the public mind with the horrors of the slave-trade.'* We merely wish to lay before the self-elected champions of the negro a brief résumé of what they have effected on behalf of their wards, leaving to their own discernment, and to that of the public, to decide whether it will not be better that the sort of imperium in imperio-the Exeter Hall influence which has up to the present day pervaded the colonial counsels in Downing Street-should cease; that the duty of defending the weak and of redressing the oppressed should in future devolve on the governors, clergy, and other official servants of the colonies where such interference is required; and that every individual sheltered under the British. flag, be he white, brown, red, black, or copper-coloured, should henceforward be permitted to lapse under the protection of prac tical government and common sense.

In making this suggestion, we by no means desire that any philanthropic body, instituted for the amelioration of the physical or moral condition of mankind, should be thrown out of work at this inclement season of the year. We could easily point out to them parishes in England where missionaries are quite as much wanted as in the most unenlightened group of the Cannibal Islands; we could show them, within two days' post of London

* Buxton.

(for

(for we have had enough of the Capital itself in a preceding article)-whole districts where ignorance and oppression, and famine-ay, and pestilence-are as rife as amongst the rocks of Patagonia or in the delta of the Niger; and if any there be amongst them (it may be deemed uncharitable to surmise it) who are stimulated in their career of benevolence rather by the thirst of fame than the pure love of humanity, we believe we may assure them that most people will honour them more for one personal effort made on behalf of distress abroad—or even at home-than for all the vicarious gallantry of which there have been from time to time such dazzling displays in the Strand. The most generous disregard of other men's lives and other men's interests is a claim to celebrity which, we fear, will always be open to question.

Before the slave-trade was declared illegal, the average mortality amongst the negroes during the middle passage was computed to be 9 per cent. Mr. Buxton admitted, in 1840, that the courses adopted by himself and his party had increased that ratio of deaths to 25 per cent. Slave speculators, in consequence of the augmented chances of pursuit and capture, found it their interest to carry on their trade in sharper and flimsier craft, fast sailers, run up at little cost. They likewise considered it advantageous to crowd them to an incredible degree with slaves, in order that one rapid and fortunate passage might remunerate them amply for previous losses by mortality and confiscation.* But no one could describe the failure of all that had been attempted, with a view of putting down this traffic, prior to 1840, more forcibly than Mr. Buxton has himself done:

'Millions of money and multitudes of lives have been sacrificed, and in return for all we have only the afflicting conviction that the slavetrade is as far as ever from being suppressed: nay, I am afraid that the fact is not to be disputed, that while we have thus been endeavouring to extinguish the traffic, it has actually doubled in amount.'- The SlaveTrade, p. 171.

In the year 1791 the colony of Sierra Leone was established under the same auspices, as a nucleus whence the blessings of Christianity and Agriculture were to extend their ramifications over benighted Africa. Its motto was, The Bible and the Plough.' Officials of every grade were exported fresh and fresh from England (for they died very rapidly) at the expense of the Government. Clergymen, schoolmasters, and missionaries, simple

The captures of the Jesus Maria, of 35 tous (the size of a Cowes pilot-boat), with 297 souls on board-of the Si, of 89 tons, with 400 souls-of the Vincedora, of 16 tons, and 71 souls (Buxton)—-attest too clearly the cause of the increased proportion of deaths,

and