of those wretched and deplorable hovels, which are only the receptacles of squalid misery, of famine, and of disease; and which are a standing libel upon the cold and callous cruelty of the government and the inhabitants of Great Britain. Let us imagine that the fire-places of cottages were improved, and their means of procuring fuel facilitated, that the inducement, or rather the absolute necessity of committing depredations on the woods, and coppices, and hedges of their neighbours, might no longer exist; that parish mills, village-shops, and all other means of supplying the poor with an abun dance of the necessaries of life at a cheap rate, be gradually introduced, where they might be deemed useful and proper; that the condition of common beggars, and mendicants of every description was enquired into; that the idle and iniquitous were compelled to work, and the friendless, forsaken, and forlorn, were, either relieved at home, or received into a decent and comfortable asylum; that the situation of poor children, who are turned over in lots and parcels, as apprentices to manufactories, and there left unprotected

and forgotten, to endure all the hardships and miseries, which the demon of unrelent ing avarice, and the pitiful meanness of systematized traffic can inflict upon helpless and much-suffering infancy, should be placed under a system of inspection: Let us imagine, that friendly societies were the subjects of voluntary, individual and collective aid and encouragement in every part of the kingdom; that parish-work-houses were amended and regulated, and tenanted by the only persons, who should reside in them; those whose distressed and isolated condition, without relatives and without friends, precluded them from doing better out of them; not the idle, the vicious, the profligate, the abandoned, who, generally, render these places the abodes of every thing that degrades and debases human nature, converting what ought to be a charitable asylum for deserving indigence, into a den of thieves, a nest of dæmons, an infernal council of miscreants, who live in the continued dereliction from every moral and religious duty. And that parish relief be continually and systematically directed to the encouragement of industry

of œconomy, and of virtue, and so rendering the poor man happy in his own cottage, instead of it's being made the instrument of dragging him, and the wife of his bosom, and their little babes to a work-house, thereby palsying all his energies of body and of mind, and entailing misery and destitution beyond all power of count, on him and on all that belongs to him; for in a parish work-house

"hope never comes

"That comes to all."

Imagine this, or even a part of this ef fected; and hebetated, indeed, must be the being, scarcely possessing mind enough to keep him awake half the day, who does not perceive what a stupendous aggregate of individual and collective happiness and virtue such measures must produce throughout all the departments of society, from the mo narch who sits on his throne to the infant that crawls upon the thresh-hold of the cottage.

ESSAY CXXI.

NARRATIVE CONTINUED.

To all those who have not yet dried up every drop of the milk of human kindness, who have not exhausted all the springs of charity some account of the reasons why this blessed Society was instituted cannot but be. productive of pleasure. The first motive, which stimulated the conductors of this inestimable Charity to enter upon their heavenly undertaking was the rapidly augmenting progress of the poors rates. This demon of desolation, begotten by the incubation of heated dulness upon well-meaning but mistaken and short-sighted benignity, and nurtured by the conjoined influence of tender folly on the one part, and of slavish dependance and listless indolence on the other, had now increased to such a stupendous size, that it's gigantic strides menaced speedy ruin and destruction to all the happiness, power, and virtue of the land pro

prietors, and of the indigent classes of the community in this kingdom. Nearly three millions of money annually expended in pa rochial relief, and a still greater sum in charities and benefactions, for a long period of time, have added nothing to the amelioration of the lot of the poor; but, indeed, have rather been productive of detriment to it, by paralysing all their exertions, by cutting them down to the torpescence of slavery, and by extinguishing every ray of hope, so that nót even a wish has been left to gild the gloom of their situation. How is the heart to be supplied with nutrition when all the streams of circulation are dried up? where can be the vigour and stability of that government, which has cut asunder all the sinews of its peasantry, has drained the life's blood from all its people?

: Some animals, who have wished to be thought philosophers, have, with true Baotian wisdom, assigned the increase of our poors-rates to be the necessary consequence of our rapidly augmenting national prosperity. This is, indeed, drawing conclusions from premises, with a vengeance. Do we