same individual and people with the greatest debasement and corruption of morals. And experience in our own island confirms us in the assertion, that these things are impotent for the regeneration of a people; and that when they are engrafted on the Sabbath, and made the substitute for its religious and proper services, they tend in the reverse direction. The gin-palace soon plants itself around these places of public entertainment and amusement, and finds in them a smooth and fascinating pathway to its snares; and few spectacles in our land are more riotous, more debased, more miserable, or more alarming as regards the future of our country, than a Sunday excursion-train, when it comes back and empties upon a city its pleasure-seekers and worshippers of nature. It is well known to masters, that such men, depressed by the reaction of riot and excitement, seldom return to their labours on Monday along with the tradesman who has turned his Sabbath to its proper and sacred uses. Nor is it difficult to foresee that if once the Sabbaths in Scotland and England were generally given to pleasure-seeking, they would ere long be bought up by commercial cupidity and enterprise, and the career of the working-man would resemble that of Samson, first sitting on the lap of pleasure, then bound and groaning in intellectual darkness and moral night, and ending his retributive course by drawing down upon himself and upon those who had enslaved him the pillars of our social edifice. "The mere animal," says the late Hugh Miller, "that has to pass six days of the week in hard labour, benefits greatly by a seventh day of mere animal rest and enjoyment: the repose, according to its nature, proves of signal use to it, just because _it is_ repose according to its nature. But man is not a mere animal: what is best for the ox and the ass is not best for him; and in order to degrade him into a poor unintellectual slave, over whom tyranny, in its caprice, may trample roughshod, it is but necessary to tie him down, animal-like, during his six working-days, to hard, engrossing labour, and to convert the seventh into a day of frivolous unthinking relaxation."