In taking the instance of France, it is not that the writer for one moment imagines that poverty is a word without meaning in our own lands. The clamming factory hands in the Lancanshire valleys, the distressed ribbon weavers of Conventry, and the impoverished laborers in various parts of Ireland and Scotland would be able to give us a definition of the word fearful in its distinctness. But in England poverty is happily partial, while in France in the eighteenth century poverty was universal outside the palaces of the nobles and the mansions of the church, where luxury, voluptuousness, and effeminacy were regnant. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries travelers in France could learn from "the sadness, the solitude, the miserable poverty, the dismal nakedness of the empty cottages, and the starving, ragged population, how much men could endure without dying." On the one side a discontented, wretched, hungry mass of tax-providing slaves, and on the other a rapacious, pampered, licentious, spendthrift monarchy. This culminated in the refusal of the laborers to cultivate the fertile soil because, the tax-gatherer's rapacity left an insufficient remnant to provide the cultivator with the merest necessaries of life. Then followed "uncultivated fields, unpeopled villages, and houses dropping to decay;" the great cities--as Paris, Lyons, and Bordeaux--crowded with begging skeletons, frightful in their squallid disease and loathsome aspect. Even after the National Assembly had passed some measures of temporary alleviation, the distress in Paris itself was so great that at the gratuitious distributions of bread "old people have been seen to expire with their hand stretched out to receive the loaf, and women waiting in their turn in front of the baker's shop were prematurely delivered of dead children in the open streets." The great mass of the people were as ignorant as they were poor; were ignorant indeed because they were poor. Ignorance is the pauper's inalienable heritage. When the struggle is for the means of subsistence, and these are only partially obtained, there is little hope for the luxury of a leisure hour in which other emotions can be cultivated than those of the mere desires for food and rest--sole results of the laborious monotonousness of machine work; a round of toil and sleep closing in death--the only certain refuge for the worn out laborer. Without the opportunity afforded by the possession of more than will satisfy the immediate wants, there can be little or no culture of the mental faculties. The toiler badly paid and ill-fed, is separated from the thinker. Nobly-gifted, highly-cultured though the poet may be, his poesy has no charms for the father to whom one hour's leisure means short food for his hungry children clamoring for bread. The picture gallery, replete with the finest works of our greatest masters, is forbidden ground to the pitman, the plowman, the poor