work. We shall therefore assume, on the part of the reader, a general acquaintance with the history and actual state of English Pauperism; premising, that no patriotic American will wisely refuse his attention to the subject, as a transatlantic one, since the inevitable tendency in our elder states, and especially our older towns, is to a condition of things which nothing can prevent or relieve so well as the lights derived from the experience of the Old World.

It is maintained by Dr. Chalmers, that the English method of relief fails of its object, tends to magnify the evil, and generates new abuses, greater than those which it would relieve. These evils are now almost irremediable, so that, as he says in his Memoir read before the Royal Institute of France, Foreigners are more likely to profit from the history of this great and memorable delusion than the country itself which has been the victim of it, and which at this moment makes striking display of the tenacity of inveterate and long-established error, in extending the same hurtful policy to Ireland-thereby to aggravate the distempers of that unhappy land.' And he reasons thus. Providence has constituted man with reference to an alleviation

if not prevention of extreme want. There is the urgent principle of self-preservation-there is the principle of filial and parental piety-there is the principle of mutual compassion, operating between rich and poor, and yet more strongly between poor and poor. But each of these is injured and enfeebled by the influence of a public charity for the relief of indigence: and of this proposition, the facts in proof fill these volumes. The English Poor-law has created more misery than it can by any possibility relieve. Many a single parish holds forth in miniature the example of an over-peopled world. Again, the affection of relationship is undermined. Aged parents are abandoned by their children, and children by their parents. Thousands, every year, abscond from their dwellings, and consign their families to the public. One newspaper contained no less than forty advertisements of runaway husbands from the town of Manchester. This unnatural desertion is the epidemic vice of England.' Again, the poor-laws tend to shut up the springs of humane charity. All which the rich give to the poor in private beneficence, is but a mite and a trifte when compared with what the poor give to one another.'

6

* See Princeton Review, for 1841, pp. 99, and 417.

For example, the legal allowance of bread to prisoners varies at different places. In Bristol it was below the par of human sustenance. The allowance was too small for the criminals; and for the debtors there was no allowance at all. When the latter, therefore, must have inevitably perished of hunger, the former, namely, the criminals, shared their own scanty pittance along with them. Dr. Chalmers's own testimony is, that, when, as a minister in Glasgow, he had a parish of ten thousand people, the poorest of the poor, the spontaneous charity of neighbours for each other was a more certain as well as more abundant source of relief, in cases of extreme indigency, than that legal charity, by which, when in full operation, the other is well nigh superseded. The system, further, arrays the rich against the poor, erecting them into great opposing castes. In every way then,' he concludes, it is better for a nation to keep clear of any legal enactment for the relief of indigence; and more especially for a government not to take out of the hands of its people, the duties which they owe either to themselves or to their relatives or to their neighbours. The great lesson to be learned from the example of England is, that the economic condition of the lower classes is not improved but deteriorated by the establishment of a compulsory provision for the destitute-which provision too, besides aggravating the miseries of their state, has, by introducing the heterogeneous element of an imagined right into the business of charity, turned what ought to have been altogether a matter of love into a matter of angry litigation, and greatly distempered the social condition of England, by the heart-burnings of a perpetual contest between the higher and humbler orders of the commonwealth.'

Among the abundant testimonies cited, is that of Thomas Clarkson, the philanthropist, concerning his own parish, and touching particularly the actual influence of the poorlaw upon the English mind and manners:

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"The spirit of independence is not entirely, but nearly gone. believe, to be found in nine cases out of ten, among the poor. Here and there an old-fashioned labourer remains, who would suffer much, rather than ask for relief.-Among the persons born of late years, all hang on the parish for support.-I have been frequently at Vestry Meetings, where applications have been made for clothing. I have told the father,-‘The children are yours, and it is your duty to provide for them, or you ought not to have married.' The answer has always been, the children belong to you (the parish); I cannot get for them what they want; you therefore must.'-I have often been inclined to think, that they have no natural affection for their children, and I have told them so.-They will tell you at once, I have brought up the boy so

far. I wish to get rid of him. He belongs to you.'-In fact the poor-laws have taught the paupers to discard all dependence upon themselves, and to look to the parish for every thing they want."

The testimony is universal throughout England, in regard to the perfect unconcern with which the nearest kinsfolk abandon each other to the poor-house. (vol. xv. p. 149.) And with all these evils the system is inadequate.

"There is, perhaps, no parochial history in England, that more demonstrates the inefficacy of poor-rates,-than that of Darlaston, in Staffordshire. Its popu lation in 1821, was 5585; and of its thousand and eighty families, one thousand and sixty were employed in trade, handicraft and manufactures. Comprehending only about 800 acres of land, it has almost no agricultural resources; so that the rate falls almost entirely on those householders who are not paupers themselves. The chief occupation of the people was mining, and the filing of gunlocks, which latter employment failed them at the termination of the war. The distress began to be felt in 1816, at which time the poor-rate amounted to £2086 15s. 7d. It was now that the resources of a compulsory provision arrived at its limit-for the continued occupation of the land would have ceased to be an object, had the holders of property been compelled to provide for the whole emergency. So that the grand legal expedient of England, was in this instance, tried to the uttermost, and its short-comings had just to be made up by methods that would be far more productive, as well as far less needful, were there no poor-rate, and no law of charity whatever. Mr. Lowe, the humane and enlightened rector of this parish, succeeded, by great exertion, in raising the sum of £1274 14s. 8d. from the benevolent in various parts of the country; besides which there was the sum of £1157 10s. contributed by a society that was formed, we believe, in London, to provide for the extra distress of that period. In all there was distributed among the poor in 1816-'17, the sum of £4523 3s. The parish work-house was quite filled with them. Its rooms were littered down for the reception of as many as could be squeezed together. Some were employed to work upon the roads-and in the distributions that took place of soup, and potatoes, and herrings, the gates were literally borne off the hinges, by the pressure of the starving multitude.-We have the distinct testimony of Mr. Lowe, that it lay within the means of the people in good times, to have saved as much as would have weathered the whole distress."

"In all parts of England, the shameless and abandoned profligacy of the lower orders is most deplorable. It is, perhaps, not too much to say, that the expense for illegitimate children forms about a tenth part of the whole expense of English pauperism. We do not deduct, however, the sums recovered from the fathers, our object not being to exhibit the pecuniary burden that is incurred, but, what is far more serious, the fearful relaxation of principle which it implies.—In the parish of Stroud, Gloucestershire, whose population is 7097, there now reside sixty-seven mothers of illegitimate children, who are of an age or in circumstances, to be still chargeable on a Poor-Rate. In the In Parish of St. Cuthbert, Wells, with a population of 3024, there are eighteen such mothers. In St. Mary's Within, Carlisle, a population of $592, and twenty-eight mothers. In the parish of St. Cuthbert's Within, of Carlisle, there is a popu lation of 5884, and also twenty-eight mothers of illegitimate children now on the parish. In Horsley, Gloucestershire, there is a population of 3565, and, at present, twenty-nine illegitimate children regularly provided for. In St. Mary le Bone, the number of these children on the parish, is four hundred and sixty. But it were endless to enumerate examples: and perhaps, the far most impressive evidence that could be given of the woful deterioration which the PoorLaws of England are now working on the character of its people, is to be

gathered, not from the general statement of a political arithmetic on the subject, but from the individual displays that are afforded, either in parish vestries, or in the domestic habitations of the peasantry; the unblushing avowals of women, and their insolent demands, and the triumph of an imaginary right over all the tremors and delicacies of remorse which may be witnessed at the one; and in the other, the connivance of parents, and sisters, and natural guardians, at a prostitution now rendered creditable, because so legalized, as at least to be rendered lucrative. Instances do occur, of females who have so many illegitimate children as to derive a competency from the positive allowance given them by the parish."

The public charity of Scotland is less pernicious than that of England, because it less violates the constitution of human society. The difference between the two countries in this respect is wide. In the one, we read of a Scots parish supporting its paupers for twenty pounds a year; in the other, of many an English parish of equal population expending fifteen hundred pounds a year for the same object. There is indeed in Scotland a number of parishes in a transition state from one method to the other. general plan, however, is, to raise a fund, chiefly by collections at the church-doors, which is administered by the KirkSession. Through all the parishes where this mode is resorted to, Dr. Chalmers estimates the average expense of pauperism at less than forty pounds a year.

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In the support of spontaneous rather than compulsory charity, Dr. Chalmers entrenches himself on scriptural ground, and takes the Bible as the surest directory of beneficence. The lesson here learnt is, that the poor of each separate congregation should be supported from churchofferings alone. And here, we freely admit, is the particular point at which it seems impossible to apply his principles in all their extent to the nascent pauperism of America inasmuch as his whole scheme presupposes a parochial division of territory, such as is rendered impossible by the intermingling of sects under our free constitution. Yet, even in the working of a plan of which the principle may never be adopted by us, we may learn much that is valuable from the details; we shall not fail therefore to give a succinct view of the remarkable experience of our author, for eighteen years, chiefly as pastor of two churches in the most populous city of Scotland.

Dr. Chalmers was successively the minister of two parishes in Glasgow, four years of the first, and rather longer of the second. In the Tron-church parish, the poor were sustained partly by compulsory assessment, and partly by collections at the church-doors. In St. John's, the Session

stipulated for a separate and independent management of their own collections; engaging, in return, to send no more paupers to the fund by assessment, and to provide for every new applicant by church-alms alone. They succeeded in extricating the parish from the city-system, in spite of opposition from the General Session, the Town Hospital, and the Presbytery. It was with difficulty, and only by personal vindication before the General Assembly, that Dr. Chalmers obtained the privilege of trying his experiment. These, he often states, were the only difficulties: When,' says he, ' instead of the old managers of the poor, we had but the poor themselves to deal with, all went on smoothly and prosperously.'

The population of the parish, in 1819, was 10,304; it has since reached 14,000. It was and is the poorest as well as the largest parish in Glasgow. The annual expenditure for the whole city sometimes exceeded £14,000. The produce of the church-door collections at St. John's, had averaged £400 a year: with this Dr. C. agreed to meet all future claims for relief, besides laying out an annual sum of £225 on the actual pauperism. He further engaged to secure the Town Hospital from the burden of any new pauperism from his parish. There were these conditions, however, which were very equitable, that in those rare seasons of general depression, such as call for a general subscription to eke out wages, the St. John's parish should be left to provide for its poor as in ordinary times; that paupers from other parishes should not invade theirs; and that when surviving hospital-paupers died off, the parish should be relieved from further assessment: a most advantageous bargain, truly, for the administrators of the old system with the poorest parish in the city.' Not one of these conditions was ever fulfilled. The scheme was by many regarded with disdain; but it was executed, and the method was this: the parish was divided into twenty-five parts, under the management of twenty-five deacons, each of them having charge of about four hundred persons. No case was brought before the deacons, as a body, till the individual to whom it belonged had made sure what each applicant could do for himself. The Sabbath collection amounted to £600 a year; but this whole sum went, in the first instance, towards the expenses of the old pauperism, with which they had charged themselves. The deacons were concerned solely with the new pauperism. The only fund at their disposal was