sons which made the English people strong; in the first place very early Industry erected her pavilion and her exchange here; and Industry and Freedom grow together: very early our merchants brought the produce of other nations to this kingdom, and our artizans and our miners brought forth from the bowels of the earth, and fashioned and attempered even the dead metals to their skill; thus the people became strong, for wealth is strength, and not the less in days of injustice and times of fraud; the baron's chain mail, his casque, his banner and plume, were the produce of a nobler labour than he could conceive, and the rich tent of the monarch, and the luxurious idleness of his life, were fashioned from the argosies constantly floating in from the wealthy East to the storehouses of our burgesses and merchant princes; and hence the reason why we find that the people were appealed to by monarchs of the most tyrannical character. The king of England frequently in his very despair invoked their protection and threw himself into their arms; from the nature of the tenure of feudalism it was so, that the king the great feudal baron, and his barons were constantly quarrelling; the barons were the known foes of the people; the king in many instances found it policy to be their friend, and some of their privileges dated from services rendered to him in the hour of his distress; thus again freedom grew in England, every reign gave to its citizens a more commanding position, the prince became weaker while from his weakness they obtained concessions of right; the barons too became weaker, until the town superseded the village and trade feudalism: for when the battle smoke cleared up from the fields of Towton, Tewkesbury and Barnet, nearly the whole order of the barons was found lying dead on the field, while the popular cause does not seem to have suffered: but really it and all popular interests were found advancing and heightening: the battles of the Roses had in truth been the contests between the mercantile and landed interests of the day, the towns were enlarging and improving, filled with wealthy traders and healthy and independent manufacturers; hence if ours is to be called the " Age of Great Cities," the Tudor period may be called the age of rising cities; spite of all the tyranny on the throne, the eye turns affectionately back to the whole times from the seventh Henry through the day of Elizabeth; it was an age of prosperity and commercial triumph, and in the towns of that day we see sown the seeds of those mighty liberties and institutions we boast as so peculiarly our own. But from the power accumulated in those rising foci of industry we date also many of those evils we now deplore, and against which we seem inefficiently to struggle. Rousseau asks how it is that in a thriving city the poor are so miserable, while such extreme differences are hardly ever witnessed in those countries where there are no instances of immense wealth? The reason is obvious in cities there is a larger number of poor, because there is a larger amount of inde : E pendence; hence from commerce and manufactures rose, not poverty indeed, but that class specially called the poor; hence through the course of long years and ages, the poor as a class have perpetually called for attention; various pieces of social mechanism were contrived to meet their necessities, but unfortunately it has been the sad lot of poverty to suffer twofold evils, first from injustice in the sum received for the amount of labour, and next from its almost inevitably being confounded with "sturdy rogues and staff-strikers," and the base and wicked of every time, to whom idleness was a gain, and sin a necessary recreation. And hence it became necessary to institute Poor Laws; they existed, indeed, from the reign of Edward III., when the clergy were enjoined to appropriate portions of their revenue to the maintenance of the poor. The 43rd act of Elizabeth was derived from the statute of 1391, and we may instance also the statutes of 1406. He who would understand the interesting question of the progress of the people (which is in truth what we ought to mean by the History of England), must read the voluminous and learned work of Sir F. M. Eden, to which this chapter must acknowledge itself indebted for many of its facts, and compare the interesting statements in the first volume with the tables adduced in the last. During the course of many years, pens innumerable have been employed on the condition of the poor, and it is necessary to consult their writings to understand our position. The writings of Locke, of Yarrowton, of Dr. Davenant, of Mr. Dunning, and Daniel Defoe, differing materially in every point, are all most instructive. The question of the extent to which a state should provide for its poor, is now a very old one. So long as 150 years since, the poor seem to have pressed as heavily on the mind of the country as now: it was about that time that Defoe published his work entitled "Giving Alms no Charity, an address to Parliament, and containing principles quite applicable to our own times. He reprobates the idea "that it is the business of the legislature to find the poor work, and to employ them rather than to oblige them to find work for themselves." He says, "from this mistaken notion come all our workhouses and corporations :" he says, "begging is in the able a scandal on their industry, in the impotent a scandal on their country. Giving alms is no charity. People have such a notion in England of being pitiful and charitable, that they encourage vagrants, and by a mistaken zeal do more harm than good. The poverty of England does not lie among the craving beggars, but among poor families where the children are numerous, where death or sickness has deprived them of the labour of the father; these are the houses that the sons and daughters of charity, if they would order it well, would do well to relieve. As for the craving poor, I am persuaded I do them no wrong when I say, that if they were incorporated, they would be the richest society in the nation; and the reason why so many pretend to want work is, that they can live so well upon the pretence of wanting work, that they would be mad to leave it and work in earnest." Further, he goes on to say-and what truth is there in what he says for England in the nineteenth century?" We are the most lazy diligent nation in the world; there is nothing more frequent than for an Englishman to work till he has got his pocket full of money, and then to go and be idle, or perhaps drunk, till it is all gone, and perhaps himself in debt; and ask him in his cups, what he intends, and he'll tell you honestly, he'll drink as long as it lasts, and then go and work for more. I make no difficulty to promise, on a short summons, to produce above a thousand families in England, within my particular knowledge, who go in rags, and their children wanting bread, whose fathers can earn their 15s. to 25s. per week, but will not work; who have work enough, but are too idle to seek after it; and hardly vouchsafe to earn any thing but bare subsistence and spending-money for themselves." "I can give," he goes on to say, "an incredible number of examples among our poor. I once paid six or seven men together on a Saturday night, the least 10s., and some 30s., and have seen them go with the money directly to an ale-house, lie there till Monday, spend every penny, and run in debt to boot, and not give a farthing of it to their families, though all had wives and children. From hence comes poverty, parish charges, and beggary." Thus we see that precisely the same moral causes afflict |