and Birmingham the representatives which the Tories, and especially the parsons, would have denied them. To be a reformer was held by the clergy and gentry to be a rogue and rascal of the first rank. I cannot call to mind any public action taken in support of the suffering and the poor to which the clergy and the gentry in our village, or in any of the villages round, lent any support whatever. As regards the great Anti-Slavery agitation, for instance, the only meeting on the subject was held in our chapel, where a Captain Pilkington came down from London to lecture, and touched all our hearts as he showed the lash and the chains, and the other instruments of torture which that cruel system sanctioned and required, and you may be quite sure that when next day I, with boyish pride, pardonable under the circumstances, was sent round to get signatures for a petition to Parliament on the subject, it was not long before I got my paper filled. Naturally the Dissenters were active in the work, for had not one of their number—poor Smith, missionary at Demerara—been foully murdered by Demerara magistrates and planters because he took the part of the black slave against his white owner and tyrant? Yet I was disgusted, after remembering the effect produced in our Suffolk village by the captain’s eloquence, to read thirty years after in Sir George Stephens’s “Anti-Slavery Recollections,” that “Pilkington was a pleasing lecturer, and won over many by his amiable manners, but that he wanted power, and resigned the duty in about six months.” In our simple village it was enough for us that a lecturer or speaker came from London; or as the country people called it Lunnen. That was a sufficient guarantee for us of his talent, his respectability, and his power. Since then the scales have fallen even from the eyes of the rustic, and he no longer sees men as trees walking. Railways have rendered the journey to London perilously easy. Hodge, in the vain hope to better himself, has left his village home, its clear skies, its bracing air, its healthy toil, its simple hours, and gone to live in the crowded slums. It may be that he earns better wages, but you may buy gold too dear. A healthy rustic is far happier in his village. It is there he should strive to live, rather than in the town; and a time may come when English legislators will have wisdom enough to do something to plant the people on the land, rather than compel them to come to town, to be poisoned by its bad air, its dangerous companionship, and its evil ways.