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and if the influence of government can be restrained from lowering and perverting the public taste, the demand for great characters will not become extinct. The worth of humanity itself, and the comparative worthlessness of its accidental accompaniments and decorations, are lessons that deserve perpetual and universal teaching. An old writer exclaims

"Deck an ape

In tissue, and the beauty of the robe

Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast ;"

while Fletcher grandly declares—

“Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Be honest, is the only perfect man."

CHAPTER XV.

SOCIAL EVILS, AND THEIR CURE.

THE greatest of all social evils is poverty, because it is the most prolific cause of suffering and crime. Disease in its epidemic and endemic forms is a powerful source of suffering, but it is itself more the offspring of poverty than of any other cause. Any great depression of the labouring classes is invariably followed by a large outcrop of some kind of fever; and the typhus that is the constant inhabitant of filthy crowded habitations disappears in proportion to the ability of the population to pay for and obtain better dwellings. Even drunkenness, which it is common to represent as the foundation of so much mischief, is most prevalent with the poorest classes, who fly to the gin-shop or to the bottle to relieve a sense of depression created by the wretched. surroundings that poverty provides; and it is scarcely possible to reclaim a drunken class without first removing some of the miseries which constituted

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the incentive to drink. The hard drinking which was a fashion with the last generation must not be confounded with drunkenness. No doubt a large number of persons belonging to the middle and upper classes did get drunk, and their habitual potations disposed them to inflammatory disorders, and contributed to shorten the duration of their lives; but it was in the main consistent with a discharge of daily duties and the ordinary requirements of an industrial occupation. Their drinking was in fact a fashion inconsistent with social refinement, but not leading to that profound debasement which the drunkenness of poverty-a disease, and not a fashion-invariably produces. Poverty is often the offspring of ignorance, but it is equally true that ignorance is continually the offspring of poverty; and a great difficulty in the way of national education is the necessity for juvenile labour to assist in maintaining the families of the working men. Through poverty disease waits upon infancy, childhood, manhood, and old age; through poverty the formal education of the child is made difficult or impossible, and the insensible education of surrounding circumstances and habits, which is often the most powerful, degrades instead of elevates. When the poor seek for recreation they must be content with a bad sort,

because that which is better is beyond their pecuniary reach. The society of the very poor is harsh, squalid, and frequently vicious, and this not from any fault of their humanity, which often displays itself in noble colours, but because the condition of want and misery oppresses and suppresses finer developments, and stimulates moral deformities and morbid growths. It was a beautiful thing of Christianity to bless the poor whom the society, of ancient times, could not raise into comfort or happiness; but now, the task of the day is not to repeat" Blessed are the poor," as if their condition was open to no other solace than benediction, but to act in such conformity with natural laws that abject poverty shall cease to exist.

It was once a favourite occupation of moralists to contrast the virtues of poverty with the vices of palaces and the courts of kings; but a more careful examination has shown that the virtues like to be decently housed, and it would be easy to draw a money line in any community, below which there was less than the average amount of good character and conduct. Above a certain point, increase of wealth has no tendency whatever to produce superiority of morals; but below the decency point, poverty has an unquestionable and powerful influence in generating vice. What is

called the "Great Social Evil" is intimately connected with this fact,-poverty pigs both sexes and all ages together in hovels fatal to self-respect; it sends the girl to domestic service or the factory without that previous training that can enable her to resist temptation; it deprives thousands of reasonable prospects of marriage, and exposes thousands more to inducements which a few shillings would destroy. The licentiousness of an upper class is usually proportioned to the poverty of the mass of the people; and in every state the proportion of persons who habitually live above the point of want or stint, is an index to the average morality that prevails. The old cant that gold is the fount of evil is well-nigh dispelled, and the author of the Ingoldsby Legends' was right in his story of Cornelius Agrippa, when he represented the worst of devils as an 66 empty purse. When modern scientific benevolence raises the condition of the

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poor, it applies money, which they could not command, in the purchase of good things, or the buying off evil ones: schools, sanitary schemes, reformatories, all partake of this character, and they can but slightly antedate what the people would do for themselves if their pecuniary condition were improved. Knowledge and money are the great forces of modern society: the former is sure to

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