be the instrument of a great progressive advancement in the habits and condition of his families. We should not wonder, though it became at length to him the most grateful, as it will be the cheapest of all his amusements-a new method opened up to him, by which to purchase the greatest enjoyment for the least money. He will doubly rejoice in it, that it is an operation twice blest-blessing him who gives and him who takes.

SECT. III. Supposition that the Visitor of a District enters on the walk which we have assigned to him, and appears before its population in the capacity of an Office-Bearer in the Church.

1. But before we proceed further with our argument, we must remove a serious impediment in its way, from the minds of those who may be thinking all the while, that as we spoke of the people in a district being taught to help themselves, or to help each other-we presumed an aggregate sufficiency within its limits which does not exist, and so have reasoned on a nonentity. And certain it is, that when we do propose to commit an applicant for relief-either to his own economy, this should imply that he has something to save; or to his relatives, that they have something to give; or to the kindness of neighbours, that the means and materials are in their hands, wherewith to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. But is this true in fact ? We have selected as the field of our enterprise a congeries of the poorest house

holds in town, and then tell of its own capabilities for a surplus there by which a process of internal charity might be kept agoing. Now, where in the name of wonder, and of all that is incredible, is this surplus to be found? Can it have any real substantive being among these very poorest of the poor? We admit them to be possessors of the same humanity with ourselves, and as such must be subject to the working of its various laws -the law of self-preservation, and of relative affection, and of sympathy between man and man. There are hearts to feel amongst them; and we should gladly add hands to give, if, while we see the hands, we could also see as palpably where or how it is, that they can have ought to give away. We dispute not the existence of the requisite morale amongst them. But the materiel is indispensable also; and, wanting this, it is poetry and nothing more to talk of a healthful interior circulation, with its ducts of conveyance running along in fancied lines of beauty, from household to household as well as from heart to heart, or from kindred to kindred, to children and parents and sisters and brothers and uncles and as far on as to remotest cousinship. One might be made in this way to figure a system of empty tubes; but the inconceivable thing is a stream to fill them, and without this a process of home charity in such a mass of destitution is but an aerial speculation. And whence it is asked is the aliment to be had by which alone a body or a substance can be given to it; and apart from which we but listen to a dream,

or look on a gaudy picture drawn by a man of glowing imagination.

2. And yet it will be found that the imagination is all on the side of our incredulous objector. The first, the capital illusion into which they have fallen, is that there exists, in this country at least, or we could almost venture to say in the civilized world, an aggregate of two or three hundred human beings living in their own habitations and presenting to view a dead level of the alike helpless and irremediable poverty. There is no such thing. There is a gradation and an inequality everywhere. I know of magnates in the Cowgate of Edinburgh; and scarcely an assemblage of fifty contiguous tenements in the poorest region of Glasgow, where along with operatives who earned for the time but five shillings a week, there were not others intermingled who were earning from twenty to sometimes fifty shillings a week. If these our contemptuous judges, instead of reproaching others with theory, would but enter on the work of exploration and become observers themselves, they would soon find that they too had imaginations to be corrected, certain spectral notions of their own which a little experience, if they but knew how to profit by its lessons, would speedily dissipate.* But to come at once to our proof, it can, not only be grasped at conjecturally, but ascertained and stated arithmetically, how

* This I have spoken to at greater length in my work on "the Importance of a Right Moral to a Right Economical State," at p. 195–201. Vol. XX. of this Series.

We

much the people of any given town, or even with a sufficient approximation to the truth, how much the people of any given parish or district in it, annually expend on intoxicating liquors; and to make it more applicable for our argument, on such liquors as are used in greatest proportion by the common people. For example, Sheriff Alison of Glasgow, in his recent work on Population, calculates on certain specific data that in that town and suburbs of about 250,000 inhabitants, there is spent no less a sum on whisky than twelve hundred thousand pounds annually.* suspect a possible, nay a likely exaggeration in his reckoning, and were ourselves in the habit, on very moderate data however, of reasoning on the consumption of a yearly half million-which in deference to the judgment of Mr Alison we shall now assume to be eight hundred thousand, or fully three pounds a-head for each unit of the population. This accords with the experience of many other places. In our Cowgate alone there are upwards of thirty public houses upheld chiefly by the demand of next-door customers, and implying a consumption of more than six thousand a year. It would keep our argument entire, though the yearly expenditure were taken at half of this sum -more especially as it seems agreed on all hands, that the consumption of spirits increases with the descent in the scale of society-so as to be proportionally far greater among the lower than among the upper or middle classes. But this is not the only article of indulgence on which the * Alison on Population, Vol. II. p. 119

means of the people might be economized or diverted to other and better objects. We are authoritatively told of the enormous profits of pawnbrokers-amounting it is said to half a million a-year in Glasgow; and which with a little benevolent care and attention might all be committed back again to the parties from whom it had been extracted another mighty enlargement then to the comfort and sufficiency of the common people. But there are many other items of extravagance and mismanagement beside these; and which all taken together bespeak an immense internal fund the real and rightful property of the people themselves; and which if recalled from its present useless, or even pernicious direction, would mightily conduce-not to the present comfort alone, but to the independence and future elevation of the working classes in society. The largest sum yet specified for a poor-rate in Scotland is eight hundred thousand a year, being nearly six hundred a year for each two thousand of the population. But if, instead of this relief coming to them from without, we can find no less a sum than six thousand a year amongst themselves, now squandered to their hurt but capable of being recovered for a better and happier destination—the achievement of this latter enterprise were surely a far greater boon to the families, and a truer benevolence on the part of their friends.

3. And here it may be felt, that, in thus laying open so large and worthless an expenditure, we speak harshly of the common people. To this we reply that we know of no exemption for any class