hinder their extension--can we venture to assert that the condition of the great mass of the people has improved in proportion to our riches? Are the relations of employers and the employed on so satisfactory a footing as to give no grounds for anxiety? Has the labourer, by whose toil all those vast accumulations of capital are created, enjoyed an equitable share of them? Have his means of domestic comfort increased in the same ratio as the wealth of his master? Is not the rate of his remuneration diminishing with every step in our progress? Has not crime, during the last half century, increased fully ten times as fast as the numbers of our population? Who can look at these, and a hundred other similar indications that readily suggest themselves, and say that all is well; that, as far as the experience of Britain goes, the road to national wealth has also conducted us to greater happiness and moral wellbeing? Alas! the evidence is but too convincing that, if there be any way of reconciling these ends, we at least have not yet found it. But we repeat that the contrariety between them is not a necessary or universal one. The conditions of great advancement in commerce and the industrial arts, are not all or invariably unfavourable to the innocent enjoyments of life among the labouring people, or hostile to their higher interests. It is not asserted that wealth is necessarily, or in itself, injurious; but only the means which we have hitherto discovered of acquiring it. The Archbishop imputes the converse of this doctrine to those who venture to deny the supreme importance of the objects of political economy, and then proceeds to demolish it by reducing it to absurd consequences. If, says he, it be true that the riches and civilisation of a community _always_ lead to their moral degradation, if you really consider national wealth to be an evil, why do you not set about diminishing it; and, following out the counsels of Mandeville, burn your fleets, destroy your manufactories, and betake yourselves to a life of frugal and rustic simplicity? Such a challenge, we presume to think, has no bearing on the position we have been supporting; and it would be just as fair an argument on our side of the question, if we were to turn round and insist that his Grace should testify to the truth and consistency of the opinions he maintains by turning our churches into cotton factories, and the University of Dublin into a Mechanics' Institute. We go no further than to affirm that, in the experience of our own and the other most civilised nations of Europe, the rapid augmentation of wealth has not been attended with a corresponding increase of rational enjoyment, or of moral improvement, in the mass of the community. Further, we hold that a legislator must recognise these three objects not only as distinct, but as subordinate, one to the other: that is to say, the government of a country is not justified in fostering the interests of the capitalist