of prudence, science, and art; faith has been made subservient to superstition, and labour has either been bound hand and foot, or compelled to contribute to the maintenance of the usurping two.

Oh! reader, is it wonderful that the labourer should be an irreligious man, when he meditates superficially on what he is in society? Is it wonderful that the thought steals over him frequently, that "he is without hope and without God in the world?” What is his political condition? all things are from him-we have seen that no building can rise, no ship sail, no engine move, no elegancies attend us, without him; without him, the whole current of social progress would be arrested: yet the simple position of the labourer is this, he is denied the right of a citizen, he is told that all he has to do with the laws is to obey them; himself the parent cause of the state, he is told that labour has no voice there. He hears of religion, but almost everywhere it is presented to him in such an aspect that it prejudices his mind against it; the minister too frequently has but little sympathy with him, or his pursuits, or class-he is generally too proud to know him or to be acquainted with his sorrows; he is perhaps a wealthy priest, the minister at a costly altar, levying unjust taxes by the arm of the law to support his rich and glittering shrines; from him the poor labourer turns to social life, the doom follows him still, he pays more dearly for his provisions than his rich neighbour, gives perhaps a fourth of his poor earnings in rent for his cottage, his poverty is taxed more highly than his master's wealth;

broken-hearted he turns away with the impression, that the world is given over entirely into the hands of a minority of men neither the worthiest or noblest, wise as the serpent, shameless as the vulture. Is it wonderful that the poor man says sometimes in the bitterness of his heart, No God? the unsympathetic rich man, and the selfish priest are both ministers at the altar of atheism.

Yet we hear in all circles of the civilization of the present age, and indeed wherever we go, we are surrounded by what seem to be the evidences of a very advanced and refined state of society. If it be true, that the evidence of advance is in the number of wants created and supplied, then, every shop is a monument of our social progress; go to the most insignificant country town, it seems to be a little metropolis, it has its elegant houses, perhaps its monuments and squares; it has elegant booksellers shops, abounding with the master-pieces of modern literature, and the best engravings from modern artists, its reading clubs, perhaps its lecture halls; its shops bear the evident stamp of taste and fashion, their exterior in many instances is costly, the order everywhere preserved exhibits respect for law and liberty when from the merely local province, we ascend to the great metropolis, or to the large manufacturing town, the evidences of social prosperity become still more ample and imposing, refinements and splendours are poured all round with a most unsparing affluence, graceful buildings meet us in every prominent street, the choicest architecture of

:

the Mediterranean or the Rhine, proofs of the most unbounded wealth astonish us; in some places, the factories illuminated seem in the distance like the fairy temples of labour and industry; in other districts, the noise of hammers, the smoke of mines and the glare of foundries, deafen and startle; other places sit on the landscape like ancient, haughty monarchs on their thrones, reposing in solemn ancestral quiet beneath the shadows of minster-turret or castle-tower the old buildings of the Plantagenets or Tudors; these places, if they do not exhibit immense wealth, yet show a stationary and fixed importance worthy of an old realm, proud of its ecclesiastical and feudal heirship. Now, we will be bound to say, if a stranger were to fly through the land he would be amazed by its imposing display of wealth, he would not deny to us great refinement and civilization; he would perhaps say, Have these people any misery? Are there any poor? Where are they?

Ah, there is indeed another aspect in which, looking through the nation, we might well doubt whether as a people we are civilized at all; would it be possible to go through any town without meeting gaunt poverty? behind those gorgeous piles, those structures startling in their magnificence, are clusters of rude huts and hovels; the wigwam of the Indian, the krall of the Hottentot, are not so sad; looking at the surrounding illustrations of pomp, they are like the slime of the reptile in the temple of the Lord; from these no city is exempt, they may be out of sight, perhaps have to be looked for, but they are at no

distant remove from even the most costly productions of the city; there live the city's producers and builders, without those poor beings festering there beneath the irritating scorn of those proud ones, to whose needs they contribute, whose luxuries they pamper, that city could no more exist than if nature were to suspend her forces; there they are, supporting and sustaining it like a coral rock, beneath the vast weight of those who have built upon it amidst its splendid furniture of woods, and groves, and singing birds, and waters. So the architects of our social fabric are out of sight, lost, crushed beneath the superincumbent weight of which they are the supporters; surrounded with splendour, they pine in squalor; the very sinews of power in others, they are powerless; their valour is appealed to to defend, their loyalty to cheer, institutions which spurn their individual rights; piles of food, firing, and clothing on every hand, they stand starving, and shivering, and naked. Our boast of the humanizing genius of our times, seems as false as the boast of the splendid literary achievements of the reign of Anne, of which John Foster has happily said, that it only resembled the kindling of some immense bonfire, while the surrounding inhabitants were perishing for lack of fuel.

Our estimate of the progress and civilization of a people must always be formed from the moral importance of the citizen himself; not from the meretricious trappings hung round the city. The small hamlet where every inhabitant is raised to the virtuous dignity of moral independence, where the wants

are few and abundantly supplied, where the body is strong, the mind clear, and the moral purpose happily balanced between duty to the supreme and duty to society, where in the absence of breathing marble and the solemn forms of life starting from stone, the abiding forms of nature perpetually stir and arrest the spirit; this hamlet with its scattered farms and cottages, its religious temples and schools would better indicate progress and civilization than the most Athenic city decked forth in all the munificence of art, with every auxiliary of science to increase its wealth. If man were not supreme infinitely beyond the stone, the error of our modern civilization—as of all stages of civilization-has been the giving more importance to the exterior crust, the material development, than to the development of the soul; ever let it be remembered the city was made for man, not man for the city. The poor match-maker shuddering beneath the monumental column, or the gas light, is of immensely greater importance than a whole firmament of such artistic trophies, and to rescue him and his order from beggary and shame, to devise some true plan by which he and the thousands he represents may rise to virtue, to independence and happiness, would confer more honour on a nation than colonades and groves frescoed with all the creations of Flaxman, of Chantry, or Westmacott, or galleries breathing with the living colours and affecting scenes of Turner, or Landseer, or Wilkie.

Then what proportion has our moral progress borne to our material? for it is surely known that, unless our moral freedom balances our achievements