professes a profound reverence for the Holy Scriptures; an anxiety to have the faithful radicated in their doctrine; the duty of explaining them agreeably to the tradition of the Church; a jealousy of their purity which guards against vicious and unauthorized translations, and the right and duty of pastors to warn their flocks against the perversion and depravation of the Scriptures by heretics. To these principles all professedly orthodox denominations are irrevocably committed; and before they can pronounce an unqualified condemnation of the Pope's circular, they must abrogate their own creeds and confessions of faith, cancel their prescription in favor of "The Authorized Version" of the Holy Scriptures, and renounce the right and duty of cautioning their flocks against bad books and leading them into wholesome pastures.

"Now as we intend neither to stultify ourselves nor to fly in the face of our Church, we shall say very frankly that we approve of the Pope's circular on these accounts. And although we are and always expect to be a heretic and a rebel in the Pope's estimation, we will go farther and say that we like the circular none the less because it emanates from the Successor of St. Peter and the primordium unitatis or beginning of unity in the Catholic Church. Our disapprobation of modern Bible Societies, of the Protestant Association, and of such books as D'Aubigne's pretended History of the Reformation, has been often expressed; and we certainly like them none the better because the Pope

has condemned them.

OBITUARY.

Died, on the 27th ult., at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in this city MaDAME WATTS, a religious of that Community.

At Marseilles, on the 12th of July, Mgr. Count Du FORBIN JANSON, Bishop of Nancy and Toul. The labours of this venerable prelate in Canada and the United States will not soon be forgotten. After his return to France, his zeal was employed in forming a Society to rescue the Chinese children from that death to which so many are consigned by their parents, and to procure for them the aids of religion. He continued his labours until a few days before his death, which took place at the mansion of his brother.-Cath. Her.

APPROBATION.

THE CATHOLIC CABINET is published with my approbation, and appears to me calculated to promote the interests of the Catholic Religion in this Diocese.

† PETER RICHARD, Bishop of St. Louis.

"In England, those who till the earth, and make it lovely and fruitful by their labours, are only allowed the slave's share of the many blessings they produce."

By C. Edward Lester; in 2 vols., 12mo. pp. 253, 293. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1841.

For three hundred years England has been basking in the glorious sunshine of the reformation. For three hundred years she has been under the manifold influences of that great religious revolution, which, in the sixteenth century, promised to emancipate the human mind from a degrading servitude, and to reinstate it in its original dignity and moral grandeur. For three hundred years has she been boasting her own superior enlightenment over the other nations of the civilized world, and disdainfully sneering at the condition of people less favoured.

But, with all this loud boasting, what is her real condition? What is the social and moral condition of the great mass of her population? Have her people been really elevated in the scale of society? Are they more free, more enlightened, more comfortable, more happy, than they were in the good old Catholic times, when the sea-girt isle acknowledged the sway of the Roman Pontiffs, and bowed reverently at the time-honoured altars of the Catholic worship?

Or, have they, on the contrary, been lowered in all these important respects? Has the shipwreck of the ancient faith in England been followed by that of popular virtue, of popular comfort, of popular happiness? And if so, has this determination been the natural and necessary consequence of the Change in Religion? We will endeavour briefly to answer these important questions in the present paper.

That England at the present day is, in a certain sense, great and glorious, we not only do not pretend to deny, but we expressly admit. Her manufactures have attained a perfection even surpassing the most sanguine anticipations, and have flourished beyond all precedent. Her commerce is truly gigantic: she trades with the whole world: her merchantmen fill every ocean and sea, and crowd every port of the nations whether barbarian or civilized. Recently she has broken down the iron wall which shut the rest of the world out of China, and she has made an important treaty of Commerce with his "Celestial Majesty, the brother of the moon." Her navy rides triumphant in every sea and ocean. Her empire bestrides the earth; the sun never sets on her dominions. She has dominions in Europe, in Asia, in America, in Africa, and in the islands of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Yet, with all this colossal power and grandeur, what is the social, moral, and religious condition of her people at home ;-to say nothing of the millions of crouching slaves who tremble under her iron sceptre abroad? She has her glory; but has she not, also, her burning shame? Like the old Roman Empire, she has extended her power over the world; but has she not, too, like the old Roman Empire, established her political ascendency by the most unhallowed means? Has she not, like that, crushed all whom she subdued, and cemented her iron power by the sufferings and blood of her subjects both at home and abroad? Have not might and right been held as synonymous terms in her political vocabulary? In one word, has her political ascendency been of real service to humanity? Has it bettered the condition of the people whom it has bowed down?

Upon this important question the writer, the title of whose work stands at the head of our article, has entered at great length, and with considerable depth of research and acuteness of reasoning. He has discussed it in all its bearings, and with a mind more free from the taint of anti-Catholic prejudice than we could have looked for in an American Protestant, and we blieve, a preacher. And though he approached the subject with a strong preference for republican institutions, and a deeply rooted antipathy to monarchy, yet he has examined it with dignity and temper. As an evidence that his production was viewed as respectable and able, we may allege the fact, that its appearance created quite a sensation in England, and drew forth a reply, to which Mr. Lester has rejoined in a more recent work, but lately published. In this last publication, he makes good all the positions advanced in the "Glory and Shame of England,” and presents much additional matter. The style of both works is dignified, chaste, terse, and vigorous.

As many among the readers of the Cabinet may not have had an opportunity to procure these works of Mr. Lester, we intend to present a rapid analysis of their most interesting contents, furnishing such extracts as the train of our remarks, indicated above, may seem to demand or permit. And, for the present, we will confine our attention to the work, the title of which we have

placed at the beginning of our remarks: and even to this we can expect within the narrow limits of one brief paper, do but very meagre justice.

England is eminently a land of social contrasts. This feature is, perhaps, the first which strikes the eye of the traveller. Gorgeous wealth and squalid misery; the greatest learning, and the most supine ignorance; the most refined luxuries and the most unqualified wretchedness; men rolling in splendid equipages, clad in silks and purple, and lolling on soft cushions, and their fellow beings half naked and starving around them in thousands :-such are a few of the striking contrasts in the social condition of England. In the language of Mr. Lester:

"Show me a very learned man in England, and I will show you some thousands around him to match the spectacle, who cannot read the Bible nor write their names: a rich man, and I will show you a thousand beggars: a polished and beautiful woman, who seems to have only enough of the earthly mingled in her constitution to say that she is mortal; one who in her. grace and loveliness would almost make you believe she had sprung, like the fabled Muses, from heaven; and hard by, yea, following her carriage, I will show you one-made as beautiful and as good as she, who is driven to sell her virtue for a bit of bread; who hunts the filthy drains for a morsel of castaway food; and who, in default of that, is gathering with her naked hands the vilest filth of the streets into her apron to sell for manure, to enrich that beautiful creature's' estate, that her degraded sister may, for her labour, get a crust or a bone before she dies."*

True, these painful contrasts meet the eye in almost every country of the old world; but in England they are more strongly marked, more harsh and grating on the feelings of the heart, as well as more numerous. There is nothing to mitigate the ruggedness, or to soften down the harshness of those painful scenes in England; whereas, in the Catholic countries of Europe, there are many things which tend to alleviate suffering, and to dry up the tear of the afflicted.

In England, pauperism is a crime punishable by the laws; in Italy, for example, it is a misfortune to be commiserated and relieved: in England, the poor, constituting the great mass of the population, are viewed with loathing and abhorrence as objects fit only to be down-trodden and crushed in the dust; in Italy, they are viewed with compassion, and are raised up from their degradation by the sympathetic hand of Christian charity. In England, the fountains of Charity seem to have been almost entirely dried up by the parching heat of avarice; in Italy, those fountains are always full and ever flowing, to irrigate, with their ever cooling waters, the parched and impoverished portions of the land. Those who have carefully studied the social condition of the

Vol. I. p. 238-9.

poor in both these countries cannot fail to recognize the truth of this picture. In regard to England, Mr. Lester affords us ample information to make good our assertion. He has bestowed particular attention on the subject of English poverty; and has unfolded both its lamentable extent, and its more lamentable causes. We will furnish a few extracts from his interesting work, on this subject. After speaking of the princely wealth and gorgeous establishments of the aristocracy, he thus discourses on the condition of the poor.

"But it has been well said by an Englishman himself, that 'to talk of English happiness is like talking of Spartan freedom-the Helots are overlooked.' But the mass of hearts beat in the bosoms of the poor (the Helots of the country,) whose every desire is ungratified, but the wish to hide away in the still, kind grave, from

"The oppressors wrong, the proud man's contumely."

He continues:

"He must be a superficial observer of the state of society here, who does not discover that, just in proportion as the higher classes advance in wealth, power and influence, are the poor depressed. What is gained by the few, is lost by the many. If the land holder grows rich, his pockets are filled by the odious and unjust tax upon the necessaries of life, which falls chiefly upon the poor. If the Manchester manufacturer amasses a colossal fortune by underselling his competitors in every market of the world, it is because his dependant operatives do not receive a fair compensation for their labor. If the Bishop rolls in wealth, his luxuries are the price of the hunger and nakedness of thousands in his diocese. If a Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland throws up his Commission after a month's administration, and retires to a Chateau on the Continent on £5,000 a year, this sum is wrung from the starving peasantry of that misgoverned island.

"It would have been far better for the poor of England, if their country had never attained her present commercial eminence; for every step of her advancement has crushed them deeper in poverty."*

The condition of these large portions of the English laborers, who are employed as operatives in manufacturing districts, is appalling almost beyond all conception. Let us glance at the picture drawn of their condition by Dr. Southey, an Englishman, and the late "poet laureate" of the English Court. Surely his testimony is unexceptionable. In his Espriella Letters, he thus discourses on the subject.

"They (the operatives) are deprived in childhood of all instruction and all enjoyment; of the sports in which childhood instinctively indulges; of fresh air by day, and of natural sleep by night. Their healths, physical and moral, are alike destroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting task-work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms; by the particles of

Vol. I. p. 141 seqq.