and it does not understand how great a task it undertook in so doing. For it undertook to solve and not to cut that great difficulty which puzzled the wisest men and the wisest nations of the ancient world, how to keep all the human beings in any given country in a condition worthy of their common humanity.

This is the real problem;-it is how to keep more than twenty millions of human beings in such a state, as that, speaking in the mass, they shall have sufficient physical comforts, and a share of political rights, and some degree at least of intellectual and spiritual cultivation. All these are the just portion of freemen,-and if we do not think it possible to provide these for our people, then let us cease to revile the Greeks and Romans and Americans, and confess that we too have slavery amongst us, and confess it to be an inevitable evil.

No, Sir,-by God's blessing it is not inevitable, if we look steadily at it, and will pay the price of removing it. We did not scruple to pay twenty millions to get rid of it in the West Indies;-would we and ought we not to pay twice as much if needful to remove it at home?

Now for the remedies; this seems a clear general rule that many being equally needed should be applied together. A remedy in itself good for one particular symptom may do harm rather than good to the whole case, if applied alone; or if not mischievous it may be inefficient. Many a man has some favourite specific which he loudly presses on our notice. If we take any one of these singly we are but trusting to a quack medicine, and shall pay the penalty of our folly-but if we take all, we may be likely to be much nearer the remedy.

Again, some things can be pointed out confidently as both practicable and beneficial;—of others we can but say that the remedy lies somewhere about them, and should be well looked for,-but its distinct shape and proportions are not yet manifest.

Of things certainly practicable and beneficial I place

first, the subdivision of parishes and townships, so as to furnish to every thousand of human beings the benefits of what may really be called society. The inhabitants of a fashionable square in London, or those of a wretched row of cottages in a mere manufacturing village, are neither by themselves deserving of the name. Into the masses of

poor now herded together in many of our large towns, the influences of society cannot penetrate. The best charm and the highest virtue of neighbourhood, that every one knows every one, is there utterly lost.

The Church Building Society has had a notion of this evil, but has surely mistaken the means of remedying it. What is wanted is to build up living churches,-not dead ones of brick and stone. That was a true and living Church which met for prayer and praise in the subterranean quarries without the walls of Rome; and such Churches would better serve our purposes than all the splendour of St. Peter's. Not that the splendour of the material church impairs the purity of the living Church; to think so were a puritanical folly; but each in its own order, first that which is necessary, the living Church; then in its season, the natural fruit of the prosperity of the living Church, comes the church of brick or stone.

The money which is given for building places of worship should be given to provide ministers. Those ministers should have each their deacons-not clergymen, nor men paid by society, which is impossible; but such good men and women as do now after a manner supply the deacon's place in large towns, under the name of visitors of the poor, supported by their own ordinary callings, and never dreaming of being paid for their services. But if these were as they should be, the deacons and deaconesses of the Church, what a variety of benefits would result from it in more ways, and in larger measure than I can now fully develope!

Together with this, it would be surely practicable and

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clearly beneficial to have in every division so constituted something of an internal administration, in which every man should be more or less concerned. A vestry is an excellent institution, but it includes only the rate-payers. It has been the misfortune of our constitution in all things to consider government too exclusively as a matter of mere management of money, and therefore to give a share in it only towards those who pay. Now there is no surer law in human affairs than that the possession of a certain degree of administrative and legislative power, if it be but administering and legislating for a common club, is in itself highly softening and civilizing; it inculcates obedience to law, because it acquaints men practically with law's importance, and identifies it in some degree with their own.

All that I have been urging was actually the system of our Saxon forefathers. They were fully aware how important it was in society that every man should know every man; they went even farther, and made every man answerable for every man. They had no notion of a mass of human beings poor and ignorant, wandering often from one place to another to find work,-unmissed in the place they leave, unnoticed in that to which they migrate. And ask of the officers of local regiments, where the men all come from the same neighbourhood,-whether this principle has not been found of wonderful force in maintaining discipline and good conduct. I have heard of a Highland regiment in which the commanding officer hasbeen known to substitute for the threat of ordinary punishment that of writing to the offender's father, and it was a threat which was seldom used in vain.

In short, the unwieldy and utterly unorganized mass of our population requires to be thoroughly organized. Where is the part of our body into which minute bloodvessels and nerves of the most acute sensibility are not insinuated, so that every part there is truly alive? Not

less true than the old tyrant's maxim of "divide and conquer," is the rule of political and Christian wisdom, "divide and improve."

This could be done at once, easily and with certain benefit. But is this enough? Then indeed if I said so my remedy would be a quack's nostrum,-I should be doing the very thing which I deprecate. This is not enough; but thus far I see my way clearly,-beyond I see only that we must advance,-I see what direction generally the road must take, but the country has not yet been sufficiently surveyed to determine the particular line.

Something must be done to restrain the enormous accumulation of property in single hands, to facilitate its acquisition and secure its possession to the mass of the community. Men must distinguish clearly between small tenancies and small properties; the former, as in Ireland, are but a source of servility, wretchedness, and crime; the latter, as in Norway, and in every other country where they have ever existed, have been a source no less sure of independence, comfort, and virtue.

Sooner or later men must look to the question of the debt. Do we really think that the property and industry of the nation can struggle against this burden for ever? Why do we make such a cry about the Corn Laws, and not look to that monstrous evil from which the whole difficulty of the Corn Law question proceeds? Every acre in the kingdom is deeply mortgaged; every manufactory is mortgaged, every mine is mortgaged;-our very limbs and minds, -our industry and our skill,-are so to speak mortgaged, and yet our very existence depends, not on our merely rivalling but actually surpassing all the competition of nations whose land, capital, and faculties are alike unburdened.

This has been well known by the greatest and ablest of men,-by Burke and by Niebuhr; this was clearly seen by the unprejudiced sagacity of Hume; this must com

mend itself one would think to the common sense of every man who has ever felt the burden of being in debt, and the pleasure of feeling that his property and his income were his own. That the greatest sacrifices would be wisely made to ensure this object, and that thus alone can a scandalous bankruptcy sooner or later be prevented, appears to me perfectly certain.

There is enough to think on in what has been already stated. Would that others would carry on the train of thought which I have suggested, would improve it where it is just, and would correct it where in error!

XVII. CHURCH ESTABLISHMENTS.

[From the Paper dated March 21, 1840.]

SIR, I am sincerely unwilling to add to the number of your correspondents on the subject of Church Establishments;-unwilling besides, if I trouble you at all, to write upon any other question than that to which I have generally confined myself. But in truth this discussion about Establishments does touch most nearly the question of the social improvement of our poorer classes. Difficult as such improvement must be under any circumstances, it must be, humanly speaking, utterly impossible, if the voluntary system, as it is called, should ever be set up on the ruins of the Establishment. Inadequate as our means are at this moment, what would they be if all those funds, which now in every part of the kingdom are set apart for public purposes, were to be taken from the public, and given over to private individuals?

If I understand the objections to an Establishment rightly, they resolve themselves, at least so far as the writers in the Christian Reformer are concerned, into these