exertions of the active, and of the wealth of the opulent. All these will be too little for the removal of the evil which our own mistakes have caused. We have need enough of charity; and if we would learn how to apply it, there are those among the sufferers who can instruct us. There is in existence a letter from a poor operative living in a district where charities of food and clothing abound, entreating the influential parties whom he addresses to put an end to the almsgiving which leaves no chance of a just provision to the high-souled working man. There is in existence a petition from a body of agricultural labourers to the House of Lords, last year, praying for the abolition of legal charity which condemns the labourer to starvation or degradation. These documents are signs of the times which are not to be mistaken, and which may well strike us silent with shame at our incessant complaints of the poor for having lost their spirit of independence, and become a degraded race. Where is our Christian charity, when we first wrest from them their independence, and then taunt them with the loss? when we invite them to encroach, and then spurn them for encroaching? Even from this enormous evil, however, good is at this moment arising. The rapid, the appalling increase of the mischief has directed the general attention towards it; and the two grand principles with which we set out afford the suggestion of remedies which are actually in preparation. It is now many years since certain commissioners, appointed by the French government to investigate our pauper system, pronounced it the great political gangrene of England, which it was equally dangerous to remove and to let alone. The mischief has been on the increase ever since, and yet there is hope of cure. If it were not that we had sound principles to go upon,—if we had all this vice and misery on our hands to be got rid of we knew not how, our condition would indeed be deplorable. But, once having got hold of the truth that ours is a society where labour abounds in proportion to capital, we know at least how to look about for a remedy, and with what aim to direct our proceedings. We must lessen the inducements to indigence, (strange that such should exist!) by making the condition of the pauper inferior to that of the independent labourer, and ensure its remaining universally so by appointing a rigid, impartial, and uniform administration of the funds of our legal charity. Every diminution of the inducements to indigence is necessarily an increase of the inducements to independence; both by giving the right bias to the inclinations of the labourer, and by saving a portion of the subsistence-fund.