gigantic evils beneath which society already totters; by demonstrating their resistless and interminable accumulation, so long as this fatal neglect prevails; by exposing to the reprobation of sound philosophy the vaunted establishments in which the very spirit of evil is incorporated; by tracing the practicable combinations of skill and experience, through which the progress of the malady may be gradually but surely arrested; by elevating, in short, the vulgarity of a trite and barren maxim to the dignity of a great political truth, and reducing the vague and almost hopeless aspirations after an improve ment which seemed to elude every grasp, to the precision and energy of a practical system.

Mr Malthus had the undoubted merit of leading the way in speculation; but Dr Chalmers, if we mistake not, has been the first boldly to vindicate in his writings, and to attempt to reduce to practice, what we consider as the leading principle of the whole theory of population and of pauperism. It is his opinion, that the moral restraint which Malthus enjoins, may be best created and invigorated by the agency of the ministers of religion zealously exerting themselves among their flocks; frequently communicating with them by offices of kindness and beneficence; descending to personal intercourse and fami liarity even with the lowest and most depraved of them; and exercising a gentle but unremitting inspection over their conduct, which, after feelings of friendship and good-will have once been excited, cannot fail to have a powerful influence over the whole cast and temperament of their minds. There is in Scotland a mighty moral mechanism already established in the constitution of her church; in the habits, character, and functions of its ministers; in the temper and disposition of the people, which has hither to, throughout the larger portion of the land, saved us from the disorders that have overtaken the sister kingdom. The first object of Dr Chalmers has therefore been to attempt the restoration of his own parish, situated in the most populous city of Scotland, to the purity and simplicity of the ancient model; and he has, on a former occasion, assigned the reasons which lead him to expect so many beneficial results from

such a change, and explained the circumstances which render the ecclesiastical mechanism of a Scottish coun→ try parish so powerful an instrument in sustaining the decent pride and independent spirit of the people.

The commission to the minister and elders, who generally reside within the parish, of the power of managing and distributing the funds for relief of the poor, the limitation of these funds in the ordinary case, to the collections made voluntarily at the church doors; the character of a voluntary contribu tion, which is carefully stamped even upon the extraordinary donations made by the heritors in seasons of general distress; the feeling which is thus dif fused among the poor, that for the assistance granted them they are not indebted to any right which they can vindicate, but to that benevolence which others are pleased to exercise; the consequent uncertainty of any pro vision for their wants; the powerful stimulus thus given to their indus try; the deeper shame attached to an application for that aid which is considered as a matter of favour only, not of legal claim-all concur in animating the peasantry of Scotland to the hard est struggles with fortune, before de scending to the degradation of pauper ism. Add to all this, the narrow li mits and scanty population of many country parishes; the general acquaintance and intimacy which subsist among the inhabitants; the deep reluctance which is felt at the exposure of misfor tune, before those to whom the pau→ per has not only been long known, but with whom he has long been ac customed to live upon terms of equa lity; the dreadful humiliation of re ceiving aid from a fund which is not formed of the exclusive contributions of the rich, but into which the pauper's own neighbours and friends have also thrown their mite; the minute and degrading enquiries into the condition of the applicant, which the system of economy, in the management of a fund so limited, must imperiously demand-and compare these, and many other obvious circumstances which we have not leisure at present to detail, with the seductive obscurity attainable in our large cities under the present system; with the perplexing amalgamation of all interests and claims produced by the interference of general sessions; and, above all, with

the fatal prevalence of legal assessments, which impart to the claim of the pauper the dignity of a right, and give to its final establishment, through resistance and litigation, the pride of a victory; and you can have no difficulty in discovering what has kept most of our country parishes aloof in their original purity, and what that fatal combination of circumstances is, which is fast approximating the population of the cities to the corruption and misery of the English system.

It is true that the country parishes have advantages peculiar to themselves, which can never be communicated to great and especially to manufacturing towns; and we conceive that it is the greatest error committed by Dr Chalmers, that he has not duly considered the amount and value of these peculiarities, and that in the sanguine spirit natural to a great reformer, he has imagined it possible to transfer the quiet innocence of the country to the fevered and guilty combinations of a large city. Much of the purity and simplicity of character, and of the moral dignity and independence, which he so justly and ardently admires, and to which he has with great truth ascribed the inconsiderable progress of pauperism among the peasantry of Scotland, must be accounted for solely upon those principles, and with reference to that cast and description of feeling which can be created and sustained only in the comparative seclusion of a country parish, amid the regularity of its severe but animating toils, and the reserve and retirement of its scattered population. Transport such a body of people into the dismal alleys of a crowded city; give them, in place of their solitary and reflective habits, the discipline of a vast and noisome manufactory; substitute for their rustic toils the circle of its incessant and paralyzing labour; let them mingle in free and various communication with each other, and thus impart to the elements of contamination, which will certainly be found in every large assemblage, the power and the facility of affecting the whole mass; above all, let them exchange for the humble regularity of their former occupations, by which industry is never either starved or pampered into profligacy, the sudden vicissitudes and fatal revolutions of commercial and

manufacturing labour, and it will be found, we are afraid, that although you may have the same individuals, you have no longer the same materials to work upon; and that the moral mechanism, which, under happier auspices, proved omnipotent in the support of virtue, will, in this altered state, have lost much of the energy of its operation.

By what process are you, in a large city, to break down that barrier which, by separating the friends and acquaintances of an individual from his parochial connexion, extinguishes the natural pride upon which Dr Chalmers relies so much, and subdues the deep reluctance of the pauper to a disgraceful act, by enabling him to perform it under the eye of those to whose censure or approbation he is wholly indifferent? He may, indeed, if the plan of the reverend author shall be realized, act under the inspection of the minister, or some one of his parochial agents; but can this dim and distant regard, cast upon him from an higher sphere, approach in intense influence to the concentrated scorn, or the still more galling compassion of his equals? But in what manner are you to put town and country parishes upon an equality in point of moral habitudes, or give fair scope for an equal trial of the provincial system in the heart of large cities? How are you to destroy the conducting power inherent in a dense population, by which vice is so rapidly disseminated; to arrest that degradation of mind inseparable from the cheerless servitude of the body; to animate to the vivacity of rustic occupation the care-worn tenant of an unwholesome manufactory; to rouse from the lethargy of dissipation the helpless being upon whom the grosser pleasures of sense have been obtruded by his exclusion from all higher and better excitement? How, above all things, are you to provide against these rapid transitions from comparative opulence to the depths of misery, which appear to be bound up with the very existence of an extended commerce, and which, by the violent agitation of the most powerful of natural feelings; by the sad and sudden scenes of domestic misery, reiterated till they have almost lost their power of exciting emotion; by the reckless and gambling spirit which they favour, and the induration of heart

which they finally create, have proved more injurious to human virtue and happiness than the pride of commercial legislation has ever deigned to understand, or dared to acknowledge? We allude to these matters not to discredit the benevolent views of Dr Chalmers, but merely to remind him, that important as are the particulars embraced by his plan of approximating town and country parishes, there are others not less essential in which this approximation must fail, and the guilty wealth of cities pant in vain after the simple and virtuous economy which has disappeared with their unnatural expansion.

But the principle of the reverend author at least is sound-for who can question the wisdom of imparting increased moral activity to the ministers of religion, and of opening up to them the recesses of indolence and vice, which, under an erroneous system, have been shut against their pious exertions? We concur entirely with Dr Chalmers, in thinking that the Christian religion, not merely by the force of its direct precepts, but by its elevating influence upon human character, affords the surest antidote against the prevalence of pauperism, and the long train of vice and misery by which it is attended; and that the same sublime system, which, while it inculcates indulgence to the frailties of others, prescribes the most scrupulous selfrestraint among its followers, provides at once for the abridgement of the claims made upon public benevolence, and the enlargement of that bounty by which inevitable calamity is to be relieved. It cannot be the spirit of that religion which broke the chains of domestic slavery over the wide extent of a converted world, to encourage that crouching habit, which is at once the cause and the consequence of poor laws, and which subjects the mind of the labouring classes to all the corruption of real slavery, with this additional degradation, that their state is the result of profligate choice, not of over-ruling necessity. The ascendancy of Christian principles over minds where their power is now unfelt, is the highest and noblest form in which that moral restraint can be diffused, to the redeeming energy of which philosophers have trusted for arresting the disorders of society. The disciples of Malthus cannot refuse their approba

tion of the course pursued by Dr Chalmers for he proposes to make the first grand experiment that has yet been attempted to verify their speculations, which, but for the enthusiasm of this great preacher, might have long remained a dead letter in the repositories of neglected wisdom. The disciples of Christianity cannot refuse their approbation-for it is the object of the author, by relaxing the springs of a complex machinery, under which the moral energy of his office was chained down in inaction, and by repelling from his order a monumental incumbrance of secular duties, imperceptibly accumulating, and slowly exhausting their spiritual vigour-to restore them entire to the native dignity of their functions; and by the augmented power of their ministrations, not only to diffuse the blessings of religion where they are at this moment unknown, but to render Christianity the instrument of a great deliverance from an evil, fearful in its actual magnitude, and yet more appalling as it is seen in the distance of futurity. The men of the world, who, without philosophy or religion, cannot remain insensible to the actual pressure, nor shut their eyes to the approaching danger, must applaud the benevolent zeal, even if they should distrust the sanguine anticipations, of him who solicits only the unenvied privilege of labouring upon a field of neglected misery, from which feeble and fainting virtue would at once recoil, and who dares to traverse those regions of human wretchedness and despair from which worldly policy dreads every moment a fierce and wasteful explosion.

Every step made towards the accomplishment of the author's benevolent designs, is a clear and positive advantage to society. This is not a case where questionable principles are to be acted upon-where much good in possession is to be hazarded for uncertain improvement-where partial success is real failure-and where there are no intermediate points, in the progress of achievement, at which the mind can rest with the satisfaction that something has been gained. When one profligate character has been reclaimed by the assiduous ministrations which Dr Chalmers so beautifully enforces in his pamphlet, and which in their unostentatious privacy are yet so

much more powerful than the public services to which the clergy have, by the system of large towns, been necessarily limited, something of great and unquestionable value has been effected. Dr Chalmers has elsewhere remarked, that the influence of the Christian religion may be shed over the whole of society, although but a small number of individuals may be truly embued with its spirit-for such is the influence of purer character, and a more elevated tone of feeling, even over the profligacy with which it is surrounded, that it gradually raises worthlessness itself to an approximation of its own better standard. Every individual reclaimed becomes an instrument in the reformation of others; and the minister, acting upon the plan suggested by Dr Chalmers, without supposing him to have any incredible success in the work of conversion to Christianity, may, by multiplying, even in a very limited ratio, the examples of industry, sobriety, and independence of spirit, which the persons with whom he is the most successful will certainly exhibit, create a very magnificent result of moral and social improvement. What the reverend author demands, is the improvement of the Christian and civic economy of large towns, by subjecting to the pious influence of each clergyman a fixed and limited population, with every individual of which he can communicate, either directly, or through the medium of an agency chosen and confided in by himself-by restoring to the kirk sessions of towns the sole and uncontrolled management of the voluntary fund contributed for the maintenance of the poor and by relieving the minister of the secular duties, which have of late years been crowded upon him in unexampled succession, and which have deprived him of the leisure necessary to the adequate discharge of his spiritual functions. Upon this last point, which has long been a favourite one with the reverend author, he has a vehement and powerful pleading in the pamphlet before us.

That the execution of his arrangements would increase the moral influence of the clergy, and prove a blessing to the people of Scotland, it is impossible to doubt; but that it would not be speedily or generally attended with all the practical consequences anticipated by the enthusiasm of the author, it is

impossible to disguise. He approaches the subject with the zeal natural to the founder of a system, and seems to count upon the general diffusion and the perpetuation of that ardour which is perhaps confined to his own sanguine and benevolent bosom. His own accomplishments are of a rare, and, what is more to the present purpose, of a highly popular order; and what may be found practicable to the attractive talent of Dr Chalmers, may prove utterly impossible to the pious and useful mediocrity with which he must, in the nature of things, be surrounded, and by which he and his contemporaries must alike expect to be succeeded. The system of the reverend author is one of a simple and obvious structure, owing little to the ingenuity of invention, and claiming every thing from the energy of per formance. It is one which proposes to recall the clergy of our large cities from the minute but useful toils of a secular nature, which have, in the progress of society, been superadded to their spiritual functions, and of which the performance is exacted with the regularity, and yielded with the facility of mere official routine, to the sublimer offices of Christian zeal, which there is no external influence to enforce, no reward but the approbation of conscience to encourage, and which, above all, are beset with difficulties such as can be conquered only by something like apostolic energy and devotion. Is it unreasonable to fear, that a project of this kind, cast above the level of the ordinary capacities of execution, may perish with the ardent spirit of the projector, and that its very essence may be found to be that unconquerable zeal, which the lapse of years, alas! must extinguish, and which the system itself cannot sur vive? Dr Chalmers has eloquently demanded the exemption of his order from that load of secular duties, of which, no doubt, he has personally felt the intolerable pressure, and has urged the splendid contributions which they might make to the literary and philosophical fame of the country, as an inducement to the concession, and painted in strong colours their intellectual degradation in another age should the reasonable boon be refused by the legislature. But among the clergy of the church of Scotland, highly respectable as they are, how minute

must be the proportion which men of original and commanding genius bear to the whole number, of which that reverend body is composed? Does Dr Chalmers believe that the church could fill one half the chairs in the universities with philosophers, historians, or poets, or that men of this high class, as they rise successively into distinction, can be defrauded by baser competition of an asylum, which, by presenting at once excitement and leisure, combines the very elements described by the author himself, as essential to the developement of the powers of genius? But genius, in truth, loves to struggle with difficulties, and is invigorated by the contention. No one can question the genius of the reverend author himself, and high expectations are justly entertained of his powers of future performance; yet is he about to rush, with pious benevolence, upon a scene of arduous and repulsive duty, before the Alpine prospects of which, all but the energy of genius, and the firmness of Christian fortitude, would retire in dismay. Yet we have no doubt of his success, and that he will continue to unite the popularity of a great preacher, with the yet more grateful popularity of an unwearied philanthropist. The sum of good which he is destined to accomplish must necessarily be great; but whether he may be able to effect an immediate revolution in the system of poor laws, and to lay a foundation for the ultimate disuse of compulsory assessments in the great city where his experiment is to be tried, appears extremely questionable. Even if Dr Chalmers should personally succeed, can this be deemed an earnest of the future triumph of his plan, as a general measure, to be executed by ministers of every various degree in the scale of accomplishment and popularity? Will it be possible to an ordinary man, or even to one of the deepest erudition and most exalted talent, but undistinguished by those popular gifts which have made the name of Chalmers be pronounced every where with enthusiastic applause, to collect together and assess an

admiring and crowded audience to the extent which this renowned preacher may be able at all times to realize? It may be in his power to substitute the persuasions of the gospel for the enactments of the law, without the danger of serious defalcation, but it is not upon every one that nature has be stowed this incommunicable power of wielding, at will, the passions of their fellow-creatures. We doubt, therefore, the practicability of executing the plan of Dr Chalmers to the extent which he meditates, and of deriving from it the immediate political advantages which he appears to contemplate; but it is only as to the extent of possible performance, not the soundness of the principle, that any question can arise. The moral and religi ous improvement of society, which forms the grand object of the reverend author, affords the only prospect of mitigating the evils of pauperism with which the country is at present afflicted, and averting the yet more appalling calamities with which it is menaced for the future. The standard of speculative improvement may be fixed too high for the mediocrity of that active virtue by which it is to be realised; but when the principle itself is sound, we can afford to fall short of the mark without incurring the ordinary hazards, or the yet more formidable disgrace of failure. The ardent pursuit of lofty aims will leave the vestiges of vigour and of virtue to dignify the course even which has closed in disappointment, and redeem the spirit of high endeavour from the reproach, that its energy has been poured forth in vain. The rude resistance of the world may, in the issue, be found too strong for the moral machinery which Dr Chalmers has put in motion, and his system may vanish with the spirit which gave it birth; but no accident can have power over the fund of virtue and piety which it will create for the honour of the present generation, and the example of Christian benevolence which it will transmit for the admiration of posterity.

and the beneficial consequences with which a repetition of the Institution promises to be attended.

The Scotch, in common with all