expressed only two or three pages back: our labours should be to raise these beings from their death state, and to prevent by all sound and hallowed policy, the drifting of the vast numbers to those dreary haunts. Revolutions are not the only unhealthy diseases of nations -and they do not die of revolutions; there is nothing mortal in that spasm; we do not long for one-we are too happy ourselves to pray for the fire-girt reformer. While we long for change, we would that change should come as the seasons come, borne from the natural decay of the old. But the last worst stage of a nation is, when the change ceases to be hoped for, or sighed for; when

Slowly comes a hungry people as a lion creepeth nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.*

That "hungry people" is our times' worst sign; in cellars and in miserable hovels, pining away the great day of their being “in a cycle of Cathay. All is preferable to this contented Socialism; and here is a solemn community of sexes, of property, of horror, and of filth; they have passed the limit when they began to feel in its acuteness either physical, or mental, or moral suffering; they are reaching forward to the state of the savage, the Bushman, the Bosjeman; they have no sense of the future; they have lost all idea of higher wants; they

* Tennyson.

are cut off from the great sympathies of humanity; alike in language and instinct, they are nearer to the outlaws of the African forest than to ourselves; there are thousands who pass their lives in chains, who have as high a sense of liberty, have many of them a nobler sense of happiness, a keener feeling of outrage, and cruelty, and degradation, and all that enters into the idea of humanity.

But there are those of the working classes, (and they form our hope after the despairing picture we have sketched,) who have known joys. The working man has once filled a home where there were happy faces. In his boyhood he had spread around him many comforts of which he is deprived now; the jostling competitive spirit of society has elbowed him out of the way. He was obliged to leave the home of his early happiness, but he has not left behind him memory and a sense of higher wants. Years ago he learned the sanctity of loneliness, he learned the superior happiness of retiring with his own family to his own roofbut the arrangements of society have denied him this now still we say, he has within him a sense of high wants, of deprivations which he feels to be fatal to more than happiness. He looks down, and sees the yawning gulph of crime, "the beggar's broth" scene of Goethe invites him to partake; and from the depth of his heart there comes forth a wail, a long protracted wail of agony, a shriek of horror struggling with despair, to all loving human natures full of cause for tears--to most members of par

liament, and gentlemen from dinner parties in white waistcoats, cause for laughter. But this man is not to be bowed easily to brute instincts. When some of the flippant spirits of the day have heard of, and it may be attended some public meeting, where thousands of the working classes have gathered, they have looked with supreme contempt upon them-have despised them; they should have been proud of them, they should have fostered and cheered them; they should have sought (only that they were powerless to do so,) to educate them; for these men showed, either that they had the memory of some better state from whence they had fallen, or that they had elevated themselves from some lower state beneath them, and that meeting was the rude, runic, scarce intelligble, articulation of their want-a moral and intellectual want a want nobler than a beast's, a want of freedom, of knowledge, of happiness; all of which in their true sense and import are the cravings of a divine nature after the divine. And this is the true line of separation between the suffering and the degraded class. It is a dreadful thing when the sufferer crosses those borders. Suffering in itself is noble, is educational, is the furnace, the anvil on which the spirit, by fire and by strength, is made fit for its inheritance. But the chords of suffering, if they are to bless, must sometimes relax their tension and their force. And this is not merely suffering but misery. And there is "a degree of misery, especially when in proximity to sin,

which virtue is barely able to resist."* Here, then, is the distinction between the children of labour and the children of shame; for it is impossible that any kind of labour can be followed at all, without in some degree ennobling the labourer, and leading him to a sense of selfrespect. Labour of any kind sharpens the spirit; but labour which demands any amount of thought lightens the soul, and fits it for truly lofty struggles.

It has been our custom to pass by the pleadings of society, when they have been uttered with any degree of wildness, with contempt. Yet there is a meaning in every wild outbreak, in every social disorder. Hence, Chartism seems to be a most horrid and unnatural thing. Yet it is but the utterance of a people saying to their governors, "We are badly ruled; there is injustice towards us." Statesmen, in white waistcoats, just returned from fashionable dinner parties, see inscribed before their eyes-Chartism! in flaming letters. Oh fie! hang me this man, transport that. Fools! as if that could remedy the matter-as if that did not make it worse. When governments lift the sword to strike a severe blow, to avenge outraged law, let them remember that the blow can only be effective, when the same arm that struck the blow remedies the

wrong that caused the outrage. And so Socialism is but the utterance of the same classes, saying "We are not justly treated,

* Allison.

we are not fed, we are not paid; give us our due, parcel out to us more fairly the produce of the land." The legislator in the white waistcoat is very indignant at this, sees in all only one of the devil's falsehoods. The wise legislator sees error principally in the mode of manifestation, sees a current of light beneath all the darkness, a quiet stream of truth beneath the most turbid error; he approaches this Chartism, this Socialism-looks down as into a gulph, shrinks from it, it may be, trembles at it, sees the active forms of injustice and gross inequality; but behind all the injustice he sees standing the reality of truth.

The mode in which these things may be spoken may be harsh, there may be in the teacher of these things an injustice, but the error is rather the distortion of the truth by the misty medium through which it passestruth is surely there. There will be found to be a heart of justice somewhere beneath all violent popular commotions. No thousands, no millions meet together without a meaning in their gathering. Every event the world has known threw a shadow before it every great frenzy had its portent. Like the coming rain in the cloud, or the hurrying storm among the branches of the trees, the whispers and the speeches of the people are the index fingers on the nation's dial-face, telling when the revolution will strike its hour.

And therefore we say, hear the people. What are they saying?-what are their aspirations, hopes?-how much happiness have they?—