Of the hundreds of charitable and benevolent agencies set on foot to improve the condition of the English artisan we can only speak in the aggregate. We have the clearest evidence of our senses, that many of them have not been established in vain. Some of them, indeed, have been born and carried on under serious misapprehensions, fatal to their existence, and so have perished without doing half the good which the expenditure of money and time would have warranted. But this is the exception and not the rule. Under the influence of properly organised and properly conducted societies of this nature, which have been quietly working for years, there is a sensible improvement in public morals among the masses of the people. Within the memory of the present generation lewdness, profanity, and vulgarity polluted the atmosphere of most large workshops, and the effect of all this on the minds of the younger portions of the workers must have been utterly demoralizing. Then their hours of idleness were hours of mischief; in them the old proverb of "an idle brain" being "the devil's workshop" was fully exemplified; bull-baiting, cock-fighting, low drinking, and gambling were their amusements; Sunday nor weekday did their children frequent any school, nor they themselves any place of worship; they made no provision for want, sickness, or death, and in times of enforced idleness they were a terror and reproach to the country, only kept in order by the strong arm of the law. To say that all this is changed would be idle, but that much of it is changed is beyond doubt. Even humble society now quickly lays its ban upon those who would think "to rule the roast" by proficiency in vulgarity and profanity; in our large workshops we are assured that acquirements of this nature get less and less appreciation, nor do their exhibition often escape rebuke. Under better and happier influences, many of the rules and social regulations among large congregations of workmen, such as fines and footings, which have always offered great encouragement to idleness and intemperance, have either been done away with or altered for good;[4] masters not only see it to be their interest to encourage their men where they can in habits of sobriety and prudence, but they are now often enabled to enforce regulations tending to this end which before they were almost powerless to effect.[5]