told-and that is, beside the smallness of the expenditure, the perfect facility of the management. On this latter subject too, there is a deep, I had almost said a hopeless, misunderstanding, and which, after the weary reiteration of twenty years, I still find to be well nigh incurable. One would have thought, that, could anything have opened the eyes of the public to the lightness of the task which they had taken in hand, it should have been the recorded testimony of the deacons themselves. On leaving St. John's, I sent a circular amongst them bearing a few queries, the object of which was to ascertain the exact amount of time and labour which they had expended on their respective undertakings, and that had been brought to so triumphant an issue. There may have been some initial labour at the commencement

of each deaconship, in making surveys and first visits for the purpose of obtaining an acquaintance both with the state of the families, and with the families themselves; and we hope also many genial visits paid in friendly intercourse, and with a view both to the economic and educational good of the districts. What I wanted to know was the time currently spent in the affairs of pauperism alone; and I now know, on striking an average of all the replies, that it certainly did not exceed three hours a month.

"Such is the fact-a most important one truly-for after the first objection to our scheme had been dissipated, that it required means which no ordinary church collection could supply, a second in full confidence and force was ready to take its place, that it required a management which no man in ordinary business could possibly have time for. It was as indispensable to meet the latter difficulty as to meet the former, for the purpose of making out the perfect imitableness of our system in all other parishes. But the extreme facility of this management looks a thing so marvellous as to demand an explanation -an explanation we have so often given, that an utter weariness comes upon our spirits when required from us anew. To be satisfied with, or even perhaps to understand it, one must have seized on the principle whereon the success of our undertaking hinges. It was not we in fact who executed or resolved the problem. The people did it for us. At the very time that we were complimented on the exceeding skill and strenuousness of our administration, we were lying on our oars and doing nothing,-we mean nothing in the matter of pauperism, and for this good reason, that nothing, or next to nothing, was required of us. The result did not come forth of the adminis

trative energies of our system-for excepting in first cases or first applications, such energy was seldom or never afterwards required of any of our deacons. It came from the reflex influence of our system on the families themselves. They knew that each proposal of theirs for relief would be met on our part by a strict investigation of all their resources, whether these lay in their own capabilities or in the help of others; and all who were conscious of such resources forbore to apply. The knowledge of a compulsory provision operated as a disturbing force both on the self-care and on the sympathies of Nature. Remove that provision; and these principles were restored to their proper force or original play. The body politic of our parish was put into a better condition, and all its evolutions went on more prosperously than before-not by any skilful mechanism of ours, but by the spontaneous working of Nature's previous and better mechanism.

"But let it not be imagined that though our deacons had little left for them to do in the matter of pauperism, they therefore did little for the good of the parish or the well-being of its inhabi

tants.

It is not conceivable of any wellprincipled man, whose heart was in its right place, that he should take the charge of a district, and yet take no interest in the state of its families. It were of the utmost moral importance to every cluster of our plebeian households, that we attached to each the visits and the acquaintanceship of a functionary-even though he should stand in no other relationship to its inmates than that of their general well-wisher and friend. We cannot doubt that, by the influence of these men, much was done for the people-that in virtue of their surveillance, our sewing and Sabbath and week-day schools were all better attended—that their frequent presence told on the comfort and cleanliness and whole interior economy of the houses-and that altogether there was a certain elevation of tone and habit in the little communities over which they severally expatiated. We have the most perfect assurance of such an arrangement, simple as it was, that it issued in the goodly result of a blander and better and more humanized population; and that, wholly apart from the distribution of money, there was not only a greater contentment, and not only a greater felt but greater actual sufficiency than before. By the converse of our deacons, they were not only cheered in the midst of their difficulties, but occasionally, without question, were helped out of themfar more, however, by advice than pecu

a

niary aid, better taught how to husband their own resources, and make their own hands minister to their own necessities.

"The general anticipation of our adversaries, that our means would be speedily exhausted and we should soon have to give in, not only failed of accomplishment, but was strikingly reversed. We did feel embarrassment, but from a cause the opposite of that which our enemies were counting onnot from the deficiency of our supplies, but in truth from the redundance of them. The produce of the evening collection was in the hands of the deacons fully equal to the new pauperism,while the day collection, more than equal to the old sessional pauperism, left an accumulating surplus of which I confess that I stood in dread, lest the superabundance of our means should tempt to a relaxation of our management. On this account I all the more readily consented to the proposal, that we should go beyond the original tenor of our bargain with the Town Hospital, and relieve that institution immediately of all the old cases from St. John's that were still upon their funds, so as in about two years to rid our parish altogether of its compulsory pauperism. The fact of such a redundancy in our means as enabled us to give the Town Hospital a large yearly allowance-the very opposite of their own prediction that such would be the deficiency as should speedily force us to draw from that institution-might well have opened the eyes of our adversaries to the truth, that in something else than the arithmetical element of money did the secret of our strength lie.

"After upwards of four years' connexion with the parish of St. John's, I left Glasgow in November, 1823, and it was well I did. By this time the enemies of our system had changed their argument. Baffled in their first anticipation that our means would fall short of the achievement, they had recourse to an hypothesis by which to cover the mortification of a defeated prophecy, uttered with all confidence a few years before, but which had been most signally reversed. At the outset of our enterprise nothing was heard of but the utter folly and weakness of the project; and when it did succeed, they managed to keep up its discredit by ascribing the whole success to the marvellous and preternatural strength of the projector. And so the conclusion was that it would not do in ordinary hands. The fact of our having fully and absolutely accomplished all, and more than all, that we undertook to do, they could not disguise from themselves; and this was the way in

which they disposed of it-if not by an express, at least by a tacit reference in their imagination, to a sort of wizard power which they were pleased to ascribe to the great Katterfelto or wonderworker that had come amongst them from the east. And so the whole effect on their minds was a kind of gaping astonishment, the same that any feat of magic or necromancy has on a multitude of spectators-without one ray of light to penetrate their understandings; or enable them to discern what that was which really effectuated the result, or wherein it was that the success of our operation lay. There was obviously no method by which to disabuse them of this strange impression, but by turning my back on the whole concern; and thus testing the inherent soundness and efficacy of the system itself, by leaving it in other hands.

"I accordingly left the parish in November 1823, and had there been any flaw or failure in our scheme it would soon have bewrayed itself-for, never, we venture to say, without a principle of native vigour and vitality in itself, could it have survived for a single year the amount of rough handling to which it was exposed. There was first a lengthened vacancy of near a twelvemonth, during which the deacons had it all to themselves then the brief incumbency of my first successor then another vacancy also of unusual duration-then a second successor of whom it may emphatically be said, that, in the apostolic spirit of the first founders of Christianity who gave themselves wholly to the ministry of the word and to prayer, he left the secular ministration exclusively to its own proper office-bearers. Beside all this, there was a rapidly increasing population, the persevering discountenance if not hostility of almost all public men and public bodies to our enterprise, a most unprosperous chapel which ought to have been an auxiliary but proved a burden upon the cause; and last, but most overwhelming of all, the entire neglect and non-performance of the condition which we announced from the first as indispensable to our success there having been no exemption of our parish from an assessment to which it contributed its full proportion as before, and without for years drawing from it a single farthing for any of its families. Never was any mechanism of human contrivance more severely tried, or brought more closely to the touchstone; and yet, in the midst of all these discouragements, its success is testified by my two successors-the first, Dr. M'Farlane, now of Greenock, the second, Dr. Brown, still the vener

able minister of St. John's in Glasgow.

"We must explain what it was that laid our parochial economy under so heavy a discouragement, and which at once calls forth my gratitude and my wonder that the deacons of St. John's should have kept together so long in the support of it. First then all the while that they were employed, and with such great and signal success, in keeping down the pauperism of their own parish, they lay open to the importation of all the pauperism that was manufactured so readily and abundantly in the other parishes of Glasgow.

"Nothing could be more obviously equitable than that a poor parish, the poorest in Glasgow, which had thus struggled its way to its own emancipation from pauperism, and had not for sixteen years drawn a single farthing from the compulsory fund, should itself have been exempted from any further contributions to it. But no. During the whole of that period it cost the Town Hospital nothing-yet during the whole of that period continued to pay the Town Hospital as before, maintaining their own poor, yet subject to all their wonted exactions for the general maintenance of the poor in Glasgow. Just figure the encouragement to imitation in other parishes-had we earned as the fruit of our achievement, an immunity from the assessment for all who were connected either by residence or property with St. John's; and how it would have animated afresh our deacons, had they thus become the guides and examples of a process, by which to liberate, not only Glasgow, but the other towns and assessed parishes of Scotland, from that incubus which they had so conclusively and fully shaken off from their own territory. But instead of this, not one voice, save that of an impartial stranger (Mr. Tuffnell) from a distance, was lifted up in the acknowledgment of their great service-nor one helping hand to move aside the obstructions, for relief from which our men of local authority at home, but also of local partiality and prejudice, were solicited in vain. We never could anticipate of our deacons, that they would stand out for ever, under the burden of that heavy discountenance which lay upon them. Nor could aught else be looked for but at length an inert and spiritless ministration, on the part of men who were fairly wearied out, and could no longer be expected to maintain the vigilance and strict guardianship of other years, after all hope of a general reformation was extinguished, and no other purpose was now to be served than that of upholding a mere spectacle-a thing not to be

copied, but only to be stared at-an oasi in the desert, which men could point to as a sort of marvel or mystery, but would not take a single lesson from - an object to wonder at, but not to be taught by. And accordingly in 1837, or eighteen years after the commencement of our enterprise, it was at length desisted from-not by any infirmity of the process itself in virtue of which the experiment failed; but, which is truly a different thing, by a voluntary determination on the part of the operators in virtue of which the experiment was given

up.

"It is with satisfaction that I reflect on the offer publicly made by me, at the last meeting of the British Association, and in the hearing I understand of some of the highest civic functionaries in Glasgow. I engaged to resume the process either in St. John's or in any other parish, where I might be permitted to set up the requisite arrangement-provided that the conditions were granted which I asked and were denied me on behalf of the former undertaking-that is, the same protection from the poor of Glasgow, which is secured by law against the poor of all other parishes; and a deliverance from the general assessment, so soon as we supported all our own poor upon our own resources. This offer I now reiterate; and, if not accepted by the public and official men of Glasgow, will I trust be accepted by all others as a sufficient practical reply to any objections against our scheme which may ever proceed from that quarter in all time coming. Nothing can exceed the confidence, up in fact to moral certainty, wherewith I should look on such a retracing process set up in any of the Extension Parishes of that city-on the peculiar condition, however, to meet the peculiarity of its circumstances, that the minister should be so endowed as to be at liberty for acting on the parochial system of seat-letting; and be enabled to admit into his church all the parishioners either rent-free, or at such a rent as would not exclude the humblest of his families. He must be provided not with a general but a local congregation, so as to have hearers of his own in every street and alley, perhaps in every house of his parish and so as to obtain both for himself and his office-bearers a moral ascendancy in his own quarter of the town, which, with not one per cent. of parishioners in my day's congregation, I never could acquire. Its success were infallible; and the achievement done by him might be done piecemeal in every other territory-so as at length to clear away the legal and compulsory provision of charity from our borders."

THE attention of the House of Commons has been engrossed almost entirely by debates on the Corn-laws. To attempt an analysis of these prolix discussions, were impracticable. Abstract political economy suggests the wisdom of allowing all persons to buy, sell, manufacture, and consume whatever they please, how, when, and where they find it most to their advantage, provided they do no wrong to their neighbour. But the whole system of English legislation has for centuries been one of protection, restriction, and special interference; our manufactures and shipping, as well as our agricultural produce, have been guarded from unchecked foreign competition; and so inextricably is the web of our institutions interwoven, that no part can be touched, even with a view to repairs, without causing rents, the extent of which no man can predict. Our whole social weal is complicated and artificial; great national interests have grown up, habits have been formed, property settled, and a general equipoise arrived at, which cannot be rashly interfered with without many serious risks. Under these circumstances, Sir R. Peel has proposed a modification of the Cornlaws, which meets with the disapprobation of those who consider that the present scale of protection to the landed interest is as low as it ought to

be;

and of those who think that there ought to be no protection at all, or only to an extent much below that which Sir R. Peel proposes, which is to keep the average price of wheat at about 56 shillings a quarter. The House of Commons has, however, resolved that Sir R. Peel's sliding scale is preferable to a fixed duty, having negatived, by a majority of 123, Lord John Russell's proposition to substitute the latter; and will doubtless negative any material alteration of the government scale; so that the measure, which is unquestionably a very large relaxation of the existing duties, may be considered as carried; the majority of the representatives of the rural and the town districts, admitting that the concessions are as great as the latter ought to expect, and not greater than the former ought to make, amidst the conflictions of opinion.

Her Majesty's ministers have judiciously declined stating their intentions respecting finance and commerce, or originating any measure except it be something pressing, such as an enact

ment for remedying the present anomalous state of the marriage-law in Ireland,* till the question of the corn-law bill is decided. We avail ourselves of this abeyance of public business to pass over some matters which we may find a fitter occasion for noticing when they are discussed in parliament.

This is not the only matter in which the state of the law in Ireland requires revision. A man was recently condemned to die for killing a goat, under some obsolete statute, and must have suffered but for the merciful prerogative of the crown. It seems strange that both in Great Britain and Ireland, amidst the judicial discussions in parliament and the incessant investigations of the courts of law; with a bar and a bench such as no other nation can boast, with thousands of legal practitioners constantly referring to the statutes, and with law officers provided to advise the crown, and commissions appointed for the revision of the statutes, some obsolete barbarous enactment should from time to time start up, demanding immediate repeal, but not till it has caused unexpected mischief. It was not till the year 1818 that the cruel absurdity of wager of battle was abolished, and then only by a casual conjuncture of circumstances. Mary Ashford was found drowned under circumstances indicating extreme atrocity: Abraham Thornton, who had danced with her at the village ball, and walked about with her a great part of the night, nearly up to the time and near the place of her death, was tried for murder, upon evidence of no slight strength, but was not convicted. The acquittal being extraordinary, the brother of Mary Ashford was advised, taking advantage of some old law, to prosecute Thornton a second time; but Thornton, by another obsolete law, threw down his glove, and challenged Ashford to wager of battle, which Ashford declined, Thornton being a powerful young man, and himself weakly. Thornton therefore escaped, but being everywhere execrated, he went to America, where he shortly after died. The absurd law which allowed wager of battle was, in consequence, repealed. We have alluded to this case for the purpose of shewing, in connexion with the two Irish pending questions, the need of a vigilant examination of the statutes, notwithstanding all that has hitherto been effected.

this