the plant, or the careful breeder by the animal. But who, you ask, is the we, whose office is to remove obstructions and provide conditions? The reason of the individual man governs the body of man, and moulds its conditions. The instinct of the brute enables it to provide for its wants and enjoyments. The plant has a power corresponding to this, and sufficient for its lower life. The reason of a nation resides in its reasoning men. The intelligence of a nation is in its intelligent individuals. The power is, or should be, in the hands of those fittest to wield it. In every nation there is a certain number, larger or smaller, who are wise, strong, beneficent. Happy the nation when these are its counsellors, its rulers, its heroes. When the wise select the wisest, and the strong choose the strongest, and the good support the best, a nation is in the path of true progress, honour, and happiness.

Before proceeding to particulars and illustrations drawn from our own society, let us take a glance at the conditions of happiness which civilisation, or social organisation, should give us, and see how far these requirements are answered.

There must be peace, or order and amity among nations. Does our civilisation secure this? England groans under the burdens of the wars of centuries. How many times in the life of this generation has news from the field of battle filled her proudest and happiest homes with mourning! At this hour a terrible war, which civilisation either lacks the will or the power to stop in its insane and desolating progress, is carrying pauperism and starvation into the very heart of England. In the Great Exhibition crowds press around the trophies of war. The wisdom of Parliament and the resources of the empire are exhausted in measures of defence.

There is no voice among the Great Powers of the earth potential enough to say, "Peace, be still," to the surging waves of human passion. England is silent in the face of starving Lancashire. France is silent in the face of suffering Lyons. There is no human help or hope.

Civilisation has no power over the most terrible of evils and sufferings. It cannot stop the most useless of wars, that fills one continent with butchery and another with starvation. One-half of a kindred people may rise up in madness, a fury of insane pride and love of power, and destroy the other half; or the two halves mutually slaughter each other. Fathers fighting with sons, and brothers slaying brothers, and deranging all the interests of civilisation, bringing terror, distress, and desolation on distant lands; and there is no help.

I have been to Lancashire, and seen the pallid want that wanders through the streets of her proudest cities. I have seen groups of women, who had walked miles from their homes to avoid the shame of beggary among their neighbours, -comely English dames and sweet innocent English girls,-asking for bread.

Is there no failure in the civilisation that can neither command the first condition of commercial prosperity,―peace,―nor even provide against

such a calamity as the loss of the greatest staple of its manufacturing industry? We have seen the stock of cotton lessening week by week, the prices rising, the mills stopping, and thousands after thousands reduced to that lowest deep of social degradation, which has no lower depth,-English pauperism. And what has been done? The manufacturers have looked to the Government; the Government has looked to the manufacturers. Both have looked in vain to theories of politicai economy, and both, with the means of thorough information, have been deceived by a boastful government, which promised a year ago to remove the difficulty.

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We have trusted to the American Government; trusted to the science of political economy, and supply and demand; trusted to the hope of mediation, intervention, and what not. We hoped France would do something the Emperor has declined to be our cat's-paw, though he would like a chestnut or two himself. And our public enlighteners in Parliament and in many newspapers assured us that cotton would come from China, India, Egypt, the West Indies, Africa, Australia, the Fiji Islands,

"Greenland, Zembla, and the Lord knows where."

Has it come? Is it coming? Read the prices current. The small and diminishing stock at Liverpool is become the prey of scrambling, gambling speculators, who fill their pockets with the price of starvation. A large portion is shipped away on foreign account. When we apprehended war a few months ago, the export of saltpetre was stopped by an Order in Council; but all Lancashire may starve, and no Order in Council stops a pound of cotton. The war in America is as really a war against England as if American ships were blockading our harbours. They may as well blockade ours as stop up their own. It is the same to us whether they lie off Liverpool or Charleston. It is as if every shot fired at the beleaguered Confederates passed over or through them, and came crashing among the women and children of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Civilisation should have some remedy for such an evil.

And civilisation should give us internal peace, order, protection of life and property, and enjoyment. We have laws enough, a costly judiciary, and a police sufficiently ubiquitous. But is there a morning paper without its murder? Are robberies rare? Is it possible to record the cases of swindling? Can any Englishman be secure for any day that he will not be murdered, garotted, have his pocket picked, or be robbed or outraged in some way by a vast army of outlaws, who are permitted, with the full knowledge of the police, to ply their desperate callings? Our whole society is infested with a class of parasites, which prey upon the body politic, and which we have no efficient means to remove. Ninetenths of all the crimes which fill our weekly records are committed by men and women who are professional criminals. Perhaps one time in ten, it may be one in twenty, the criminal is detected, brought to trial, and punished. And how? He is sent to a comfortable prison,—a quiet

retreat for a few months,-and then set free to recommence his career of depredations. It is as if the shepherds allowed a pack of wolves to run among their sheep, and took charge of one now and then when they chanced to see him eating one of the lambs of the flock for his breakfast. There is not an old London detective who could not parade in Hyde Park an army of thousands of men and women who live by crime. It would be an army worth seeing-such an army as we do see scattered over the metropolis, and of a few of whose achievements we read in the police bulletins.

Now, however it may seem to the Legislature and Sir Richard Mayne, it is a failure in civilisation to have such a class in the first place, and not to know what to do with it in the second. How is my life protected when I know that there are hundreds of men about me who would take it for a few pounds? Is it any satisfaction to me that, if uncommonly awkward, they might chance to swing for it? Or how is my property protected, when all around me are fellows ready to pick my pocket, garotte me, rob my house, or swindle or plunder me by a great variety of ingenious methods? It strikes me that the police-system which permits an army of scoundrels to prey upon an honest community, proposing to administer a mild and inefficient punishment to any one foolish or unlucky enough to be caught, comes very near to being a failure.

And how long, permit me to inquire, are men who have been imprisoned or transported for murder, or crimes still worse than murder, to be again set free, to repeat their horrible atrocities? The insane man is shut up for life, or until he is insane no longer. I am willing to adopt the humane theory that

"All crime is madness-madness is disease;"

but, on that very account, I would have all these mad criminals placed where they cannot injure the community by their various and seldomcured insanities.

There is another social evil, specially so called, which English civilisation utterly refuses to remedy or regulate, or do any thing with but endure because it is an evil. Society is robbed of strength, wealth, health, and life itself, and no effectual effort is made for its protection. There is a pestilence of vice, robbery, disease, and death in every large town, sapping the morals and health of the young and vigorous, counting its victims by tens of thousands; and we fail, utterly fail, of any remedy. The sanitary statistics of our army and navy show its ravages; and if those of our whole population could be known, we should stand appalled at the extent of this terrible evil. What are we to think of a civilisation which embosoms such a consuming curse as this, and does not even attempt to find remedy or mitigation, but folds its arms and says the disease must take its course? It is too bad for respectable statesmen or prudent philanthropists to meddle with.

Is there no failure in the civilisation which permits, in its great

centre London, England's and the world's metropolis, more than ten thousand of its people every year to die homeless, and which boasts of those hundreds of workhouses, prisons, or hospitals, which are the final resort of twenty per cent of our entire population? Is it no failure that four thousand infants die annually of neglect, or worse, and that half of all who are born die in infancy or early childhood? Is it no failure that fifty thousand people eat their Christmas dinners in our workhouses and prisons, or that the yearly admissions of casual vagrants to the workhouses amount to a hundred and fifty thousand? What can we say of the condition, manners, and morals of a city in which one hundred and fifty thousand families have but one room each for all the purposes of life, and in which the homes of thousands are worse than dens of beasts? Two hundred thousand persons work at hard, monotonous, unhealthy employments, under wretched conditions, for wages varying from three to ten shillings a week. Is it a wonder that their last earthly home is the workhouse, or that three London hospitals should have a hundred and thirty thousand out-door patients?

We boast of our charities, of our great hospitals, and public institutions for the relief of poverty and misfortune. Would it not be better if we could boast that such institutions were unnecessary? We give millions to relieve distress. It is well; but how much better if there were no such distresses to relieve. A social organisation which includes in itself vast masses of needless poverty, preventable disease, curable miseries, and crime fostered and stimulated, assuredly fails most lamentably in the most important objects of civilisation. The evils of society, though more striking in its lower strata, ascend to the higher and the highest. The interests of individuals, and of whole professions, are opposed to the general interests of society. Some grow rich on poverty, others thrive on disease, and not a few grow respectable on vice and crime, reap enjoyment from misery, and fatten on starvation. Health, peace, honesty, and the general comfort and prosperity, would be a deathblow to physicians, lawyers, usurers, and all the officials connected with the police and the administration of justice. In many ways society perpetuates its evils, and a social Ishmaelism is the most remarkable feature of civilisation.

To remedy all this we lack the intelligence, the will, or the power. The men who, by hereditary right or the grace of the ten-pound householders, guide and govern us, either do not know what they ought to do, or cannot, or will not, do it. I do not mean to say that a government should do every thing. In every community there are certain functions which appertain to the individual; others belong to the family; some may be properly left to churches, societies, and corporations; but there are others of such a general character and interest as to belong to the whole aggregated people and these are the functions of the Government. My indictment is, that this Government, not properly apprehending its own business, does those things it ought not to do, and leaves undone those

things it ought to do, besides sometimes doing what it undertakes in a very slovenly, bungling, expensive, and imperfect manner.

Let us take a single and sufficiently familiar illustration. The Govern ment, to the infinite disgust of political economists, has undertaken to regulate the cabmen. It has licensed them, made them wear huge badges, and display prices and numbers. And what is the result? The papers are filled with complaints, the police-courts with complainants. An honest, accommodating, pleasant cabman, who thankfully receives his legal fare, is a rara avis that might well attract the attention of Professor Owen, and claim a special trophy in the International Exhibition. Did a London cabman ever behave like a civil shopkeeper, and thank his customer for a legal fare? Is it not notorious that, in spite of daily fines and the whole police, timid people and strangers are constantly subjected to imposition and insult, because the Government will not, or cannot, do what it has undertaken?

But all this trouble and annoyance, we are told, comes from the unwarrantable interference of the Government. If there were free trade, prices would be low and every body accommodated. Yes; we could ride for sixpence a mile on a pleasant day, and be charged a crown when it rained. I have known a cabman to demand and receive five pounds for a quarter of a mile, under the free-trade system, when he was very much needed. I have heard of boatmen bargaining with a drowning man on the price of his rescue. If surgeons were scarce, we might, under such a system, be obliged to pay a high price for a capital operation. If a thing is worth what it will fetch, a doctor might say to his patient, "I can cure you; no other man can. Give me ten thousand pounds, or take the consequences." But we are hearing, just now, quite as many complaints of the unregulated hotel-keepers as of the very badly-regulated cabmen. One charges two guineas for a private room two hours in the morning, with half-a-crown to the servant who opens the door. A dinner becomes a public robbery, and to stay overnight insures an empty purse in the morning. So, whether the law interferes or not, we are plundered all the same. There is no effectual interference. Parliament, in granting railway monopolies, stipulated that the people should have cheap fares. They do, in the hardest of carriages, at the most inconvenient of times, and often so as to compel a loss of time greater than the saving in money. There is cheap travelling; but no one can say it is convenient or comfortable.

in many of the interferYou may raise as much You may sell tobacco all You must have a license

There is an utter whimsicalness, apparently, ences and non-interferences of the Government. mustard as you like, but not a leaf of tobacco. day on Sunday, but beer only at certain hours. to sell some things, and not others. Fees and salaries are fixed, wages with thousands dwindle to the verge of starvation. The law seizes unhealthy meat, but does not trouble itself with poisonous whisky. Government carries our letters and newspapers; why not our coals and hay?