Let it be remembered that our large accessions and acquisitions of comfort have enhanced and aggravated our ideas of poverty; to a large degree, poverty is now saved from positive inflictions, and cruelties; in other times the poor were condemned to a perpetual serfdom and slavery-were murdered without pity were dragged in triumph at the conqueror's chariot-wheel, or slaughtered by thousands on his tomb; the gladiators of old may be said to have belonged to this trampled race, and of these, myriads in Rome were reserved like savage animals for public spectacles; what nature now does not throb with pity and indignation, while contemplating the Spoliarum to which the poor victims, the killed or the wounded, were dragged by a hook from the amphitheatre. It was to grace the triumph of Trajan (and he was one of the mildest of the emperors,) over the Dacians that the spectacle was offered to the civilised Romans, of a combat of 10,000 gladiators, and 11,000 wild beasts. And there were insurrections of the working classes at that time, the name of Spartacus will be familiar to all readers, as one of the seventy-eight Roman slaves who escaped from confinement, and soon raised themselves into an army of 120,000, and they needed the whole genius of disciplined and military Rome to quell them too; that insurrection terminated in 83,000 left dead on the field and 6000 taken prisoners, and all crucified, lining the road from Capua to Rome, monuments of Roman power and Roman refinement. The

cruel conduct of the masters of the seven-hilled city to their slaves is well known, of this Tacitus gives us an illustration, and Seneca refers to the cries of the slaves at night chastised by their masters, he does not comment upon or condemn their barbarity, but reprobates their unneighbourly conduct, in thus disturbing the rest of the philosopher in the night; the fact that in the reign of Claudius, Rome held 60,000,000 of slaves seems incredible, and while it guides us to the condition of the children of toil and labour, gives us the key to the speedy downfall of the empire. The process of the amelioration of the condition of the working classes was slow; one of the ultimate results, doubtless, of the publication of the doctrines of Christianity, was the introduction of a new element into the social life of our worldsocial, and moral sympathy; and it immediately wrought to the benefit of man. "Charity" became "the bond of perfectness," and this even the Emperor Julian perceived; pagan virtue even to the eyes of its most ardent devotees was cast into the shade, no one could pretend to find in Seneca's morals a passage like the xiii chap. of 1st Corinthians, and there is a wide difference between the most choice prelections of Epictetus and the Epistle of James. It has

* Annals, Book xiv. p. 42. The speech of Caius Cassius, in defence of the execution of all the slaves in accordance with the ancient usage on the murder of the master, is so strong a piece of casuistic reasoning, so forcible and so apt, that every advocate of Capital Punishment now might make it a model.

been remarked that the moralists of the heathen world took notice of the condition of their fellow-men; temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude, their great cardinal virtues, all revolved round their own selfishness; the most eminent instances of heathen virtue tend rather to shock our minds by revealing the rarity of moral action, than to charm us as the exhibitions of individual goodness.

The very worst passages of our own social life show to us a most delightful advance upon those times; from the very earliest days of which we have any lucid record, from the first periods of legal definition or judicial interference, the poor have claimed and received a considerable share of attention, seldom we must admit, primarily for their benefit, yet exhibiting the transcendent importance of the idea of humanity in Christian over heathen times. The first accounts we have of the present English people, present to us a flock of slaves, villiens, who were annexed to manors, and as transferable by deed, sale, or conveyance from one owner to another, as the cattle-their companions, of any field in the realm; and they were prohibited from ever procuring their liberty, because "all the cattell and gudes, of all bondsmen, are understood to be in the power and dominion of their maister."* We have said that the religion of Jesus, the world's great civilizer, contributed to the alleviation of the sufferings and the enfranchisement of the bodies

* Auld Laws of Scotland, Buke ii. Chap. 12, quoted by Sir F. M. Eden.

of the English slaves; but only in the year 1102 did the practice of slave-trading cease in England; from the villiens and ancient thralls were derived those who first independently employed in agriculture, and who, instead of being engaged in servile offices, were only called upon to render service in kind for the tenure of the manor, such as reaping, harrowing, felling timber, draining fish ponds, &c. The Norman conquest reduced to serfdom and bondage thousands who were, perhaps, before holders of farms on the terms above mentioned, and in many instances lords of manors. Of all the Normans who invaded our shore, history has only preserved the name of one whose features look like those of a man and a brother, Robert de Rulos, who in the fens of Lincolnshire, endeavoured to reclaim waste nature, and to consult his own interest in the interest of the natives of the soil. In that day there were no poor; the people were kept, as we have already said, like herds of cattle, by the great lords of the soil. The rise of the poor, as a class, is to be traced to the gradual growth of commerce, industry, and independence. In that remote period, a poor sheep or horse might be spoken of in the same breath with a poor man; but while occupying something like the same place, the poor had not the natural advantages of the oxen or the sheep. We may safely question whether their hovels were so comfortable as the fold, the stable, or the sheep-cote-whether their food was so healthy and unvaryingand whether their happiness was so complete.

Gurth the swine-herd, and Wamba the witless, and Cedmon the ploughman, must frequently have had their spirits touched and wakened up by the presence of the scenes of nature and religion around them; and, slaves as they were, the sublime dissatisfaction, which the brute can never know, must have steeped their souls in those oaken and ashen glades and forests in sorrow and discomfort.

It was the Norman Conquest which gave rise to a feature in social life, till then unknown in England, or comparatively so, though ancient to the nations of the East,-VILLAGES,-the term was derived from the relation of the lord to his vassal and retainer; and properly to understand the elements of our modern history, we must read the history of these two modifying but active causes side by side; the history of the village, and the history of the great town; the history of slavery and bondage on the one side, the history of independence and freedom on the other; the history of the baron and the monk, the history of the burgher and the merchant. Nor let us forget, that we owe a debt of gratitude to the feudal lord and the feudal priest, especially to the latter; the abbeys and the monastic institutions have suffered much reviling, they have been spoken of as rich and wealthy, it is only honest to admit that, in most instances, they were made so by the diligence and sagacity of the monks themselves; our rich fields and farms, and cultivated lordships, are to be traced to them; the clergy were more generous cultivators of the lands, paid