of thrifty, religious New England! So alas! have we managed it. We may wince at the statement, may offer all manner of explanations of it, such as influx of foreigners, stagnation of trade, want of confidence, John Tyler administrations; but there stands the fact, in open, broad daylight, that able-bodied men and women, ready and willing to work for their food, nay, coming to you, and with tears in their eyes, begging you to give them work, have been kept through the long winter just above the starving point,-and we fear in all cases not above,-only by soup and bread dealt out by charitable societies in tin porringers. Just before the breaking out of the French Revolution, some poor peasants came to the Court, and asked for bread and got-a new gallows; which shows how it fares with the people under the monarchical method of governing. St. Ives workhouses, Glasgow lanes, Stockport cellars, and the present condition of Ireland, where, out of a population of eight millions, one-third are reduced to feed on third-rate potatoes, these scantily obtained, and failing altogether for nearly a third of the year, show how they manage matters under an aristoeracy. Soup and bread societies for men and women able and willing to work, in Boston and other cities, show to what a pass things may come under the virtuous and intelligent rule of the democracy; which, considering the advantages with which we started, the vast quantities of fertile lands still lying waste, and our youth, vigor, and elasticity, is pretty well, and may be thought to prove that, if we have not as yet come up with kings and nobilities, we are in a fair way of overtaking them, and, if it were possible, of even going beyond them.

Here we are, then, in our own country, in the most favored part of it, renowned the world over for its industry and thrift, frugality and economy, and wise management, come to such a pass that a portion-we will hope as yet not a large portion-of our population can get no work, no opportunity whereby to eat their bread in the sweat of their face. The fact is undeniable. It cannot be glossed over. It is here. We can all lay our hands on it. These soup and bread societies are no fiction. Alas, the necessity there was that they should be, is also no fiction. With our

own eyes have we seen poor children gliding along the cold streets, thinly clad, with their tin cans to receive their modicum. We have set our own feet in the miserable dwellings of those who have been thus fed, and knelt down in prayer by the poor man dying of a fever brought on by anxiety and insufficient food.

The newspapers told us some time since of a well educated, respectable man, brought up before our police for stealing a parcel from a dry goods shop. On the trial, it came out that he was well nigh starved, could get no work, and had taken the desperate resolution of stealing in order to gain the privilege of being sent to the House of Correction so as not to die starved. To such straits had it come with him, that he regarded it as a favor to be sent to the House of Correction. A poor man, a worthy mechanic, in Philadelphia, this last winter, can find no work; comes to the magistrate and begs to be locked up in the cell of the City Prison; so that he may find the food which he knows no other method of procuring. One rejoices to know that the benevolent magistrate granted him his request.

Now, in all soberness, we ask, if a state of things in which such incidents can occur, do occur, however rare, is the best that we can have in this nineteenth century, in this blessed land of America, of universal suffrage, universal education, under the blessed light of the Gospel, dotted all over with industrial establishments, school-houses, and churches? Is this a God's world, or is it a Devil's world? O, my countrymen, say what you will, decidedly this is not a question for England only; it is also a question for you. In God's name, in humanity's name, do not blink this question. Answer me, nay, not me, but your own hearts, if you are prepared, in the face of that sun which shines so gloriously on all, the lowly thatched cottage as well as on the lordly palace, to say that you solemnly believe that in the decrees of Providence, in the riches of Infinite Love, and of Infinite Grace, there was nothing better for us than these Bread and Soup Societies, this begging to be locked up in jail, and stealing in order to be sent to the House of Correction, so that the life may be left in us?

We might go further, in proof of the sad state to which we are coming or

have already come. I am told, on tolerable authority, that in this city of Boston, which I take it is the modelcity of this country, there are some four thousand wretched prostitutes out of a population of about one hundred thousand. This fact is not only a lucid commentary on our morals, but also on the difficulty there is in getting a living by honest industry; since prostitution is resorted to in this and all other countries rarely through licentiousness, but chiefly, almost wholly, through poverty. I am also told by the agents of the police, who have the best means of knowing, that the principal supply of these victims to poverty and men's infamy, comes from the factories in the neighboring towns!-no uninteresting comment on the workings of the Factory System, built up by our Banks and high Tariffs, and which the chiefs of our Industry have taken, and are taking so much pains to fasten on the country! But whence come these sad results? There must be somewhere a fatal vice in our social and industrial arrangements, or there would not, could not, be these evils to complain of. Never, till within these last few centuries, were men, able and willing to work, brought to the starving point in times of peace, and in the midst of plenty. "Gurth," says Carlyle, "born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, tended pigs in the wood, and did get some parings of the pork. The four-footed worker has already got all that the two-handed one is clamoring for. There is not a horse in all England, able and willing to work, but has due food and lodging; and goes about sleek-coated, satisfied in heart. Is this such a platitude of a world, that all working horses shall be well fed, and innumerable working men and women die starved?" We do not believe it; we will, thank Heaven! believe no such thing. Whence, where, and what, then, is the fundamental vice of our modern society, especially in this our Saxon portion of it?

On this question Mr. Carlyle's book throws some light, though, it must be owned, often of the fitful and uncertain sort. In general, and in rather vague terms, it may be answered that this vice is in the fact that men have substituted the worship of Mammon for the worship of God. Mammonism has become the religion of Saxondom, and God is not in all our thoughts. We

The demonstration of this fact, and a full and impartial description of the worship of Mammon, would be a service of no mean worth to our countrymen; but who shall undertake to perform it? The other day I chanced to drop a word which was misconstrued into a growing distrust of liberty, and voices in all parts of the country were loud and harsh in condemnation; should I now but exercise the liberty of telling my countrymen the simple truth, and of directing their attention to the error, the original sin whence has sprung the present disordered state of society, there would be no end to the berating I should receive from these same loud and harsh voices,-ready always to cry lustily for liberty, but most ready to condemn all who are really her efficient friends and servants. We boast, in this blessed land of Washington and Jeffer-son, of our freedom; we are free, ay, free as the winds that drive through our valleys or sweep over our broad plains and inland oceans,-to echo the public voice, to have no opinion of our own, and to say only what everybody believes or nobody takes the trouble to disbelieve. We knew, once upon a time, a young man, brought up in the wild freedom lingering yet in some few of our mountain homes; an earnest, simple spirit, who had the strange fancy when he came to dwell in cities and in the midst of civilisation, that he should be sincere, transparent, and speak out always, when speaking at all, the simple, naked truth, without any circumlocution or reticence, as he found himself commanded by the Highest, and as all public Teachers and Able Editors exhorted him and all men to do. Foolish youth from the mountains!.

Church were in their greatest glory; that is, from the tenth to the end of the fourteenth century. Compare the condition of what Carlyle calls the "workers" of England, the land of our ancestors, during that period, with the condition of the corresponding class at present, and one is almost struck dumb by the contrast. Cotton, as Carlyle says, is cheaper, but it is harder to get a shirt to one's back. Cotton is produced at two pence an ell, and shirts lie piled up in warehouses, and men go about with bare backs. For food, even Gurth born thrall of Cedric, did get some parings of the pork; the poor Mother and Father of the Stockport cellar, alas, none. For spiritual food, the poorest had faith and were instructed at least in the elements of the Christian religion; inquiries recently made into the condition of the population employed in the English collieries, show that human beings do grow up in the nineteenth century, in rich, ay, and Christian England, who know not even the name of their Maker, save by hearing it desecrated; and all accounts agree that the morals of the colliers are superior to the morals of the factory operatives. In the highest departments of thought and genius, the contrast is hardly less striking; our most advanced philosophers were anticipated; we are scarcely able even to copy the Gothic Church, the last word of Christian architecture; and Dante has in poetry no rival, unless it be Shakspeare.

Never before had such labors been performed for humanity. Never before had there been such an immense body, as the Christian Clergy, animated by a common spirit, and directed by a common will and intelligence to the culture of the moral virtues and the arts of peace. Then was tamed the wild barbarian, and the savage heart made to yield to the humanizing influences of tenderness, gentleness, meekness, humility and love; then imperial crown and royal sceptre paled before the crosier; and the representative of Him who lived, and toiled, and preached, and suffered, and died in obscurity, in poverty, and disgrace, was exalted and made himself felt in the palace and in the cottage, in the court and the camp, striking terror into the rich and noble, and pouring the oil and wine of consolation into the bruised heart of the poor and friendless. Wrong, wrong have they been, who have complained that kings and emperors were subjected to the spiritual head of Christendom. It was well for man that there was a power above the brutal tyrants called emperors, kings and barops, who rode rough-shod over the humble peasant and artisan-well that there was a power, even on earth, that could touch their cold and atheistic hearts, and make them tremble as the veriest slave. The heart of humanity leaps with joy, when a murderous Henry is scourged at the tomb of Thomas à Becket, or when another Henry waits barefoot, shivering with cold and hunger, for days, at the door of the Vatican, or when a Pope grinds his foot into the neck of a prostrate Frederic Barbarossa. Aristocratic Protestantism, which has never dared enforce its discipline on royalty and nobility, may weep over the exercise of such power, but it is to the existence and exercise of that power that the PEOPLE owe their existence, and the doctrine of man's equality with man, its progress."

During these and the preceding four hundred years, more work was done for humanity, under an intellectual and social point of view, than was ever done, in a like period, since history began. A writer, not to be suspected of undue partiality, in touching upon this period and upon the action of the Church, is forced to say," During the greater part of that period, by means of its superior intelligence and virtue, it-the Church -ruled the State, modified its actions, and compelled its administrators to consult the rights of man, by protecting the poor, the feeble, and the defenceless. It is not easy to estimate the astonishing progress it effected for civilisation during that long period called by narrow-minded and bigoted Protestant historians, the dark ages.

The writer here quoted, is hardly just to the Feudal aristocracy. The old Feudal lords and barons were not a mere dilettante aristocracy, a mere unworking aristocracy, consuming without doing aught for the general work of production. They were, in fact, then a working aristocracy, and

did work in their rude way, and contrived to do no little work of the governing sort; for which the governed did fare the better. In matters of fighting they did the hardest, and bore the first and heaviest blows. It was their special right, not to lead only, but to do the work of killing and of being killed. They did in some sense, in return for what they received, yield a protection to the people, and take some kind of care of them. If the serf, before serfage was abolished, labored for his lord, the lord owed him a reciprocal obligation, and must see that he had wherewithal to eat and to be clothed. If fixed to the soil, the serf had a right to his support from it. These old Barons, moreover, did not entirely neglect the Commons in contending for the interest of their own order, as we may learn by consulting Magna Charta. The service they rendered to society, was no doubt an inadequate return for what they received; but nevertheless it was some return, and the castle of the Lord, law-ward, according to Carlyle, was a tower of strength not only to its owner, but also to the hamlet lying under its walls; and the proud dame, my Lady, Loaf-distributor, was not seldom a gentle benefactress to the humble, confiding, and grateful peasants. If it was a privilege to be high-born, so was it a privilege to have the high-born among us.

On this part of the subject, Mr. Carlyle's book may be consulted with considerable advantage. He has not said all he might, nor all that we wish he had. He has given us a very pleasant glimpse of one aspect of life in the Middle Ages, that represented by the Ancient Monk; but we wish it had comported with his plan to have given us a clearer insight into the condition of the rural population, the cultivators of the soil, the thralls, sockmen, farmers, peasants, and their relation to their landlords, masters, or owners. We confess that on this subject we are not so well informed as we would be. It is a great and interesting subject, but from the glimpses we catch now and then of it, we are fully convinced that the relation between the two classes which then subsisted, was decidedly preferable to that which now is; even your modern slaveholder is obliged to recognize a relation between him and his slave of a more generous and touching

nature than any recognized by the master-worker between himself and his workman. The slave when old or sick must be protected, provided for, whether the owner receives any profit from him or not; the master worker has discharged all the obligation to his operative, he acknowledges, when he has paid him the stipulated wages. These wages may be insufficient for mere human subsistence, and the poor worker must die; but what is that to the masterworker? Has he not paid all he agreed to pay, even to the last farthing, promptly? We have not heard on our southern plantations, of Stockport cellars, of Bread and Soup societies, by the charitable, and men stealing in order to be sent to the House of Correction so as not to starve. This much we can say of the slave, that if he will tend pigs in the wood, he shall have some parings of the pork, and so long as his master has full barns he is not likely to starve; would we could say as much of the hired laborer always!

But the chief thing we admire in the Middle Ages, is that men did then believe in God, they did believe in some kind of justice, and admit that man, in order to reap, must in some way aid the sowing; that man did, whatever his condition, owe some kind of duty to his fellow man; and admit it, not merely in theory, in caucus speeches, or in loud windy professions, but seriously in his heart and his practice. But we have changed all that, we have called the religion of the Middle Ages superstition, the philosophy which then was cultivated, miserable jargon, and the governing which then went on, tyranny and oppression. We have learned to blush at the page of history which speaks of Hildebrand, and St. Anselm, and the enfranchisement of the communes, and would if we could blot it out. It is a reproach to a man in these times and in this country to name it without execrating it. The age which covered Europe over with its Gothic Churches, and with foundations and hospitals for the poor, produced St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Bernard, and Dante, Chaucer, old John of Gaunt, and Magna Charta, De Montfort, William Longbeard, Philip Van Arteveld, Roger Bacon, Albert Magnus, John of Fidanza, Duns Scotus and St. Thomas Aquinas, is a blank in human history! Thank God we have outgrown it,