if the modern fashion of paying wages out of the poor-box did not interfere with the due course of things, and reduce all the labourers of a parish, the old and the young, the weak and the strong, the idle and the industrious, to that lowest rate of wages, or rather of weekly payment to each, which, in each case, is barely sufficient for the support of life. If there were no poor-laws, or if the poor-laws were such that labour was paid in proportion to the work performed, and not according to a scale founded on the power of gastric juice under various circumstances, these superior men would be employed in preference to the inferior beings described above, would earn twice as much as the others could earn, and would have every motive for industry, providence, and general good conduct. As it is, their superior capacity as labourers is of no advantage to them. They have no motive for being industrious or prudent. What they obtain between labour and the rate is but just enough to support them miserably. They are tempted to marry for the sake of an extra allowance from the parish: and they would be sunk to the lowest point of degradation but for the energy of their minds, which they owe to their physical strength. Courage and tenderness are said to be allied: men of this class usually make good husbands and affectionate parents. Impelled by want of food, clothes, and warmth, for themselves and their families, they become poachers wherever game abounds, and smugglers when opportunity serves. By poaching or smuggling, or both, many of them are enabled to fill the bellies of their children, to put decent clothes on the backs of their wives, and to keep the cottage whole, with a good fire in it, from year's end to year's end. The villains! why are they not taken up? They are taken up sometimes, and are hunted always, by those who administer rural law. In this way they learn to consider two sets of laws—those for the protection of game, and those for the protection of home manufactures—as specially made for their injury. Be just to our unpaid magistrates! who perform their duty, even to the shedding of man's blood, in defence of pheasants and restrictions on trade. Thus the bolder sort of husbandry labourers, by engaging in murderous conflicts with gamekeepers and preventive men, become accustomed to deeds of violence, and, by living in jails, qualified for the most desperate courses. They also imbibe feelings of dislike, or rather of bitter hatred, toward the rural magistracy, whom they regard as oppressors and natural enemies; closely resembling, in this respect, the defective class of peasants from whom they differ in so many particulars. Between these two descriptions of peasantry there is another,