The best occupation of time is a question at the very root of individual happiness and national prosperity: I find it everywhere sadly neglected; here in prison, out in church, at the theatre, in public and private business, in families, in pursuit of pleasure, in the army--everywhere. It can be scarcely said, that there is anything solid in our actions; frivolity prevails everywhere, and is mixed up with our most serious professions. I cannot look back to Pagan times without seeing that they were a superior people to ourselves, and that we have fallen, through the management of our religion and politics, from, rather than risen, above them: we exceed them in nothing but hard and lengthy labour for small wages, insufficient for the necessaries of life. We have not learnt from Seneca, "that he lives longest who has made the best use of his time." Be it your study to seek to give us some sound moral reforms, and sink party politics in the moral of public good; withdraw all licences from houses of intoxication and late hours; let there be no public resort, in Parliament or elsewhere, after ten at night; if it would be no abridgement of general liberty, confine shop business to limited hours, that the conductors and assistants may have due time for mental improvement. Some of the young men and women in London shops, bitterly lament the want of more time for rational recreation, for health and improvement. They are among the veriest of slaves in confinement. Let knowledge be once legislatively encouraged, remove all taxes from it, and then a hundred minor arrangements, by legislation, may be made conducive to public good, and a bar be set against injurious, offensive, and slavish competition. It is the Tory fear--and, in justice, I will add, Whig fear too--of knowledge that has produced all the present wrongs and evils of the country; for if cunning men have legislated, it has not been done for the public good; because there has not been sufficient public responsibility. This is all Church as well as State business that I am proposing. The clear distinction as to Church and State is--that the Church means the people, congregated for mental improvement; and the State means the exercise of that mental improvement in their public business: so true it is, that Church must precede and give character to the State. Tithes are a recognition of the original proprietorship of the whole people in the land; a rent paid under that consideration, appropriate-able to the sustenance of the poor, and the mental improvement of all.