It is in those rural districts into which manufactories have spread--that are partly manufacturing and partly agricultural--that the population assumes its worst shape. The state of morals and manners amongst the working population of our great towns is terrible--far more so than casual observers are aware of. After all that has been done to reform and educate the working class, the torrent of corruption rolls on. The most active friends of education, the most active labourers in it, are ready to despair, and sometimes exclaim,--“What have we done, after all!” There, the spirit of man is aroused to a marvellous activity; but it is an unhealthful activity, and overpowers, in its extravagance, all attempts to direct it aright. “Evil communications corrupt good manners” faster than good communications can counteract them; and where the rural population, in its simplicity, comes in contact with this spirit, it receives the contagion in its most exaggerated form--a desolating moral pestilence; and suffers in person and in mind. There, spread all the vice and baseness of the lowest grade of the town, made hideous by still greater vulgarity and ignorance, and unawed by the higher authorities, unchecked by the better influences which there prevail, in the example and exertions of a higher caste of society. The Methodists have done much to check the progress of demoralization in these districts. They have given vast numbers education; they have taken them away from the pot-house and the gambling-house; from low haunts and low pursuits. They have placed them in a certain circle, and invested them with a degree of moral and social importance. They have placed them where they have a character to sustain, and higher objects to strive after; where they have ceased to be operated upon by a perpetual series of evil influences, and have been brought under the regular operation of good ones. They have rescued them from brutality of mind and manners, and given them a more refined association on earth, and a warm hope of a still better existence hereafter. If they have not done all that could be desired, with such materials, they have done much, and the country owes them much. The thorough mastery of the evil requires the application of yet greater power--it requires a NATIONAL POWER. The evil lies deeper than the surface; it lies in the distorted nature of our social relations; and, _before the population can be effectually reformed, its condition must be physically ameliorated_!