of it highly conducive to order, decency, and consequently good morals. For moral improvement, however, this plan is scarcely so advantageous as is generally supposed. An evening spent in reading, or in listening to a scientific lecture, is unquestionably better than an evening spent in rioting and licentiousness. Working men usually go clean and well dressed to the institution or lecture room, and conduct themselves with propriety while there while there, too, they escape many temptations and allurements to vice. Besides which, they are in the way of receiving a considerable amount of valuable information.

But a question arises, whether, in the case of married men, a higher moral condition would not require that the man should spend his evenings in equal decency and cleanliness with his family at home; perhaps reading to his wife after their children are asleep, and so making her the partaker of his intellectual enjoyments. This would be one means of benefiting the next generation ; whereas, according to the present system, the husband is out of the way of cultivating that union with his family, as their head, which must lie at the foundation of domestic, and therefore of social morals.

It may be asked, and with some justice, how any man whose mind is awakening to knowledge, and rising in the scale of intellect, can spend his evenings in such homes, and with such wives, as we see in some of our cottages? A higher state of morals amongst this class of people would make their domestic circumstances very different from what they now are. It is just the moral that is wanting in the cottage,-the neatly swept hearth, the decent meal, the smiling welcome, and the general good order and arrangement which even poverty need not

prevent. It is not the intellectual inferiority of his wife which sends the man away from home. Our public schools for the working classes sufficiently attest the fact that the intellectual powers of English girls-yes, and their attainments too-are quite equal to those of boys, making allowance, however, for the much more frequent and even necessary detention of girls from school, owing to domestic engagements. It is after marriage that the woman sinks, because her intellectual attainments are not much called for, and her morals are very low. It is then that she too often becomes a spectacle of degradation, enough to frighten any man away from her society. And yet to this poor degraded being is committed, almost entirely, the moral training of the children of such parents.

If anything could be done to make the cottage of the working man more alluring, and his wife more companionable to him, they might then fill their proper place in life, as heads of a household however humble, and founders of a race however poor. Their children would naturally look up to the father with reverence, gladly receiving instruction from his lips, and he would then find his happiness in discharging the noble duty of instructing others, while at present he goes out to learn, and comes home only to eat, drink, and sleep.

No wonder if the worn-out wife receives him, when he does come, with murmuring and discontent: she can see very little difference betwixt the lecture-room and the beer-shop: both take her husband away from her, to spend the best hours of his lifetime in other society. She sees no reason why the home burden should not be mutually borne. A higher moral sense on the

husband's part, a juster appreciation of duty, would make him bear it willingly and nobly.

Thus it would seem that some of our most enlightened institutions do not really produce the good desired, so far as relates to the welfare of the people. Is not this the cause that they aim directly at intellectual, not at moral progress?

251

CHAP. XVII.

POOR MEN'S WIVES.

AMONGST the various means of improvement suggested by enlightened benevolence, it is no less astonishing than it is to be deeply regretted, that so few bear any relation to that class of the community which supplies to the working man the accustomed dispenser of his pecuniary means, the chief trainer of his children, and the principal source of his domestic prosperity and happiness; or, it may be, of his misery and ruin.

But who is the poor man's wife? and from whence does she find her way to the heart and the home which it is her prerogative to share?

This inquiry is worth pursuing, because it is but too evident that the working man himself has but little time, and often less ability, for imparting that moral tone to the habits and modes of thinking which prevail around his humble hearth; and consequently it is to the mother -the poor mother—that we must look for the simple virtues of an honest and industrious offspring; or for her share in filling the gaols of her country, in peopling its penal settlements, or in adding to the fearful catalogue of its criminal executions.

The fact of the mother's almost paramount influence in humble life, so far as regards the moral training

of her children, is one which we seldom find disputed. The example of a bad father will often be found to operate as a warning to his children, provided the mother is respectable herself, and earnest, as regards her children, in enforcing what is right. But the ruinous effects of low principle in the mother, when exhibited in the characters of her children, is as fatal to individual welfare as it is boundless in its social extent. And many women are low in principle, so far as to prevent the existence of any high moral feeling in their families, who still maintain a character of outward decency, and who possibly never forfeit their good name.

Crime, when considered under the form in which I have ventured to clothe it, being the violent working out of the primary motives or animal desires of human nature without regard to law or consequence, might, I believe, in by far the greater proportion of instances which occur, be traced home to the early training of a low-principled mother. If this should seem a hard sentence to pronounce, we must bear in mind how many a youth, on the other hand, is preserved from infamy and crime simply by the operation of high principle on the part of his mother; for the lowly dweller under a rustic roof, or the poor denizen of the city chamber, may be as high in her motives,—may be as capable of choosing right in preference to wrong, even at the cost of suffering and privation, and this throughout all the apparently unimportant transactions of her narrow sphere of action,-as the refined, the intelligent, or the wealthy in their more privileged and exalted station.

The influence of low-principled mothers, and the general confusion and disorder as regards right and wrong which necessarily prevails in households governed