responsibility, the lamentable ignorance now prevailing, an ignorance which is synonymous with moral and physical degradation, could not have continued to this hour. If, instead of blaming men for what they are, and are made to be, we occupied and interested ourselves with earnest inquiries into the causes of the evils we deplore, with a view to their removal, it cannot be doubted that this real labour of love, if carried on with and through the spirit of love, would in its very endeavour include much of the good sought to be obtained. To me it seems that the greatest amount of benefit will result from the labours or the exertions of those, who unite the good to others with that which is-has been made-pleasurable to themselves; from those who seek to make what is genial and joyous to themselves more genial and more joyous to others. This is a labour in which not merely some favourite crochet, some abstract opinion, or even sincere and honest convictions are engaged; it is one in which the best, the purest, the highest sympathies of our nature are enlisted in the service, and in the promotion of those enjoyments, and of those practical occupations from which our own well-being has resulted, or with which it has been associated.*

* As examples of the success attending the removal of the exciting causes of vice or crime, instead of seeking a cure by punishment, I should wish to direct all unprejudiced minds to the results of the system successfully practised by the celebrated Robert Owen, at New Lanark, founded upon the eternal truth, that men, and, much more, children take their character from the surrounding influences. The result of Mr. Owen's benevolent exertions has proved what can be done with a vicious population. The quotation which follows, though not so well known as it deserves, will show what can be effected by a benevolent and decided man with a vicious adult population.

TO M. VICTOR DE TRACY.

Malwa, 29th March, 1832. "During a short stay in Adjmeer, I contrived to visit the Mhairwanah, the former Abruzzi of Rajpootana. It was well worth riding eighty-four miles. I saw a country whose inhabitants, since an im

Much that is now sought to be attained is very pleasant, nay, very desirable, but the means by which it is sought are not practicable, the harmonious combinations, to any adequate extent, are not yet possible; and all endeavours to force the

memorial time, had never had any other means of existence but plunder in the adjacent plains, a people of murderers; now changed into a quiet, industrious, and happy people of shepherds and cultivators. No Rajpoot chiefs, no Mogul emperors, had ever been able to subdue them; fourteen years ago everything was to be done with them, and in seven years the change was effected. I will add, that Major Hall has accomplished this admirable social experiment without taking a single life.

"The very worst characters were secured, confined, or put in irons to work on the roads. Those who had lived long by the sword, without however becoming notorious for their cruelty, were made soldiers; in that capacity they became the keepers of their former associates, and often of their chiefs; and the rest of the population was gained to the plough. Female infanticide was a prevalent practice with the Mhairs, and generally throughout Rajpootana; and now female casualties do not exceed male casualties; a proof that the bloody practice has been abandoned; and scarcely has a man been punished. Major Hall did not punish the offenders; he removed the cause of the crime, and made the crime useless, even injurious to the offender, and it was never more committed.

"Major Hall has shown me the corps he raised from these former savages, and I have seen none in India in a higher state of discipline. He was justly proud of his good work, and spared no trouble that I might see it thoroughly. Upwards of a hundred villagers were summoned from the neighbouring hamlets; I conversed with them on their former mode of life, and of their present avocations. Most of these men had shed blood. They told me they knew not any other mode of life: it was a most miserable one by their account; they were naked and starving.

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Now, poor as is the soil of their small valleys, and barren their hills, every hand being set at work, there is plenty of clothes, of food; and so sensible are they of the immense benefit conferred by the British government, that willingly they pay to it already 500,000 francs, which they increase every year as the national wealth admits of it.

"Often I had thought that gentle means would prove inadequate

time of action have hitherto failed, owing to the time being unpropitious, or to the means being unsuitable; or, still more, from the great, the fatal mistake, a mistake to which benevolent natures are too liable, that of mistaking the changed convictions of the mind for an equally decided and simultaneous change in the habits or actions. From those men the highest good is to be hoped "who have encouraged the sympathetic passions until they have become irresistible habits, and made their duty a necessary part of their self-interest; who derive their most exquisite pleasures from the contemplation of .possible perfection, and proportionate pain from the perception of existing depravation. Accustomed to regard all the affairs of man as a process, they never hurry and they never pause. Theirs is not that twilight of political knowledge which gives us just light enough to place one foot before the other; as they advance, the scene still opens upon them, and they press right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence around them. Internal calmness and energy mark all their actions. Convinced that vice originates not in the man, but in the surrounding circumstances; not in the heart, but in the understanding, they are hopeless concerning no one-to correct a vice or generate a virtuous conduct they pollute not their hands with the scourge of coercion; but by endeavouring to alter the circumstances would remove, or by strengthening the intellect disarm, temptation. These soul-ennobling views bestow the virtues they anticipate.

"That general illumination should precede revolution is a

to the task of breaking-in populations addicted for ages to a most savage life, such as the Greeks, for instance. Yet the Klephts were but lambs compared to the Mhairs, and the Mhairs in a few years have become an industrious, a laborious, and well-behaved people.

"I see M. Capo d'Istria has been murdered. I wish Major Hall were his successor, for now I have the greatest confidence in the efficacy of gentle means."

Jaquemont's Letters.

truth as obvious as that the vessel should be cleansed before we fill it with a pure liquor. But the mode of diffusing it is not discoverable with equal facility. We certainly should never attempt to make proselytes by appeals to the selfish feeling, and consequently should plead for the oppressed, not* to them. Godwin considers private societies as the sphere of real utility; that (each one illuminating those immediately below him) truth by a gradual descent may at last reach the lowest order. But this is rather plausible than just or practicable. Society, as at present constituted, does not resemble a chain that ascends in a continuity of links; alas! between the parlour and the kitchen, the tap and the coffee-room, there is a gulf that may not be passed. He would appear to me to have adopted the best as well as the most benevolent mode of diffusing truth, who, uniting the zeal of the methodist with the views of the philosopher, should be personally among the poor, and teach them their duties in order that he may render them susceptible of their rights."

The present tendencies are, I believe, adverse to the attainment of any high, pure, or lasting advantage, unless it be from the necessary re-action or recoil. I can conceive of no blasphemy more vile or self-degrading, than that which contemplates the degradation of the moral being into a political or social subjection to combinations, which, if they were as perfect and as practical as they are crude and impossible, would end in solving, by proving, the depravity of human nature.

What is to be said of a science (so called), which tends to the destruction of all that has hitherto been associated with the pure in thought and act, and which has declared, through

* I consider both necessary, nay, desirable. Would pleading for rights withheld have procured their restoration, if also the people had not been aroused by direct appeals to their sense of wrong? Pleading to the oppressed alone would be of terrific danger, did not a sense of justice aided by personal fears create advocates, who end in becoming mediators.

one of the most favoured and influential of its organs, that it would be of the highest possible advantage to Great Britain, if its country were wholly destroyed by a volcano, so that its factories and towns might be compelled to have recourse to other lands for food, and thus sell sundry additional bales of cotton or pigs of iron ?*

Well might Frederic of Prussia say, if it were wished effectually to ruin a province or a kingdom, the surest and swiftest way would be to appoint an economist the administrator. To believe that this most pernicious of all systems can long exist; to think that this faith in mechanics, mental and distributive, could long continue, except as a preparative to something higher or better, or as a condition of a quick and complete re-action, would for me sadden the earth around, and wither the very grass in the fields.

"Toy-bewitched,

Made blind by lusts, disherited of soul,
No common centre Man, no common sire
Knoweth ! A sordid solitary thing,

'Mid countless brethren with a lonely heart

Through courts and cities the smooth savage roams
Feeling himself, his own low Self, the whole;

When he by sacred sympathy might make

*This writer has, in the very article referred to, strangely verified the passage in the preceding letter, in which my excellent friend states that his MS. suggestions have been made, some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and some for the purpose of defaming him from whom they were stolen. This writer has done both. He has most grossly defamed the admirable man whom he was incapable of estimating or appreciating, and in the last number of his work has appropriated some of the most striking of Coleridge's views, even to his very illustrations. This writer, formerly a butcher, a manbutcher (I say this illustratively, not disparagingly), would be more innocently employed in destroying life than in attempting to mutilate the reputation of the great dead.