"Come my fellow-slaves of Britain. Rest, awhile, the weary limb; Pour your plaints, ye bosom-smitten, In a sad and solemn hymn." Of course if there has been no betterment in the condition of the people, despair is excusable--but if there has, despair is as unseemly as unnecessary. Every age has its needs and its improvements to make, but a knowledge of what has been accomplished should take despair out of workmen's minds. To this end I write of changes which have taken place in my time. I was born in tinder-box days. I remember having to strike a light in my grandfather's garden for his early pipe, when we arrived there at five o'clock in the morning. At times my fingers bled as I missed the steel with the jagged flint. Then the timber proved damp where the futile spark fell, and when ignition came a brimstone match filled the air with satanic fumes. He would have been thought as much a visionary as Joanna Southcott, who said the time would come when small, quick-lighting lucifers would be as plentiful and as cheap as blades of grass. How tardy was change in olden time! Flint and steel had been in use four hundred years. Philip the Good put it into the collar of the Golden Fleece (1429). It was not till 1833 that phosphorus matches were introduced. The safety match of the present day did not appear until 1845. The consumption of matches is now about eight per day for each person. To produce eight lights, by a tinder-box, would take a quarter of an hour With the lucifer match eight lights can be had in two minutes, occupying only twelve hours a year, while the tinder box process consumes ninety hours. Thus the lucifer saves nearly eighty hours annually, which, to the workman, would mean an addition of nearly eight working days to the year. In tinder-box days the nimble night burglar heard the flint and steel going, and had time to pack up his booty and reach the next parish, before the owner descended the stairs with his flickering candle. Does any one now fully appreciate the morality of light? Extinguish the gas in the streets of London and a thousand extra policemen would do less to prevent outrage and robbery than the ever-burning, order-keeping street light. Light is a police force--neither ghosts nor burglars like it. Thieves flee before it as errors flee the mind when the light of truth bursts on the understanding of the ignorant. Seventy years ago the evenings were wasted in a million houses of the poor. After sundown the household lived in gloom. Children who could read, read, as I did, by the flickering light of the fire, which often limited for life the power of seeing. Now the pauper reads by a better light than the squire did in days when squires were county gods. Now old men see years after the period when their forefathers were blind.