but a great parochial machinery of domestic visitation, charged with comfort and blessing to the needy, and spread over so wide a circle, that what was formerly an exception may now with some confidence be said to be the rule. If insufficiencies have come to be more keenly felt, is that because they are greater, or because there is a bolder and better trained disposition to feel them?... I will refer as briefly as may be to the sphere of legislation. Slavery has been abolished. A criminal code, which disgraced the Statute Book, has been effectually reformed. Laws of combination and contract, which prevented the working population from obtaining the best price for their labour, have been repealed. The lamentable and demoralizing abuses of the Poor Law have been swept away. Lives and limbs, always exposed to destruction through the incidents of labour, formerly took their chance, no man heeding them, even when the origin of the calamity lay in the recklessness or neglect of the employer. They are now guarded by preventive provisions, and the loss is mitigated, to the sufferers or their survivors, by pecuniary compensation. The scandals of labour in mines, factories, and elsewhere, to the honour, first and foremost, of the name of Shaftesbury, have been either removed, or greatly qualified and reduced. The population on the sea-coast is no longer forced wholesale into contraband trade by fiscal follies; and the Game Laws no longer constitute a plausible apology for poaching. The entire people have good schools placed within the reach of their children, and are put under legal obligation to use the privileges and contribute to the charge. They have also at their doors the means of husbanding their savings, without the compromise of their independence by the inspection of the rector or the squire, and under the guarantee of the State to the uttermost farthing of the amount. Information through a free press, formerly cut off from them by stringent taxation, is now at their easy command. Their interests at large are protected by their votes, and their votes are protected by the secrecy which screens them from intimidation either through violence, or in its subtler forms.