moral ones. She has furnished us with energies, with stimulating appetites for calling those energies into action, and with variety of matter for them to act on. But for the supply of our moral wants, for the principle on which, the method by which that supply may best be made,-comparatively few and feeble have been the attempts at discovery or application. Everywhere man has been the dupe of wealth, nowhere the disciple of happiness. He has accumulated riches till they have produced poverty,-a paradox which only the present bitter experience of society could have suggested. Where shall we seek the cause of all this? In the fact that the creation of wealth has been pursued as an end, not as a means, and individual riches preferred to universal prosperity. This is the real Pandora, which, when it came upon the world, let the ills before 'Confined, Burst furious out, and poison all the wind; From point to point, from pole to pole, they flew, The love of property has usurped the place of the love of human nature: art is valued more than the artisan, trade than the trader. In statistical inquiries, it is produce, not producers, that concentrates attention; if the former be great, the political economist is satisfied; he pronounces the country so distinguished to be in a high state of prosperity; the human feelings, faculties, and frames, that have been tortured by privation, and abridged of their fair proportion of enjoyment and of life, are not even casually glanced at; and while he exults with pride and pleasure over wealth, which is the work of man, man himself, the work of God, is regarded as the mere tool, fit only to be worn out upon the production of wealth, which is carefully stored in well-appointed warehouses, while the wealth-producers are cast at random on the waste of chance charity, or churlishly admitted to ill-constructed work-houses. The division of labour, and all the other principles of the science of political economy, have aimed at the increase of wealth, and the aim has been accomplished; but the practical morality, that ought to make a primary part of this and every science, is left out of view. Where have we plan or principle for the inerease or security of happiness, though to seek happiness be the inherent and inextinguishable master-motive of every human breast-leading naturally to the exercise of every virtue, but under existing circumstances to every vice? God is continually replenishing the world with beings endowed for enjoyment, and animated by the desire to obtain it; while man is multiplying circumstances that place all the qualifications and cravings under an impious interdiction. The love of property produced the fratricidal law of primoge niture, which parts those whom God had joined, bids brother stand opposed to brother, and, by creating discord and division in families, brings the severest curse of life upon them. I knew three sisters, co-heiresses to a not very considerable property: even in their very childhood, I have heard those girls deprecate the event of their having a brother, because, said they, He would take ALL.' Here is an evidence of the preference of dead dross to living love; the consequences flowing from such preference may easily be calculated. Children are essentially better legislators than men. I never knew a question as to the division of anything put to children, that they did not promptly decide upon an equal division; justice is obvious, and their fresh minds immediately perceive it, unless where they have been corrupted by a system of preference and injustice adopted towards themselves. I remember hearing a woman say to some children, regarding the crumbs of a plum-cake which they had been eating, It was Harriet's cake, so she ought to have the crumbs.' It is this adult interference that makes the crumbs of charity so scanty, that even the permission to pick them up from under the rich man's table is accorded as a boon, and received as a privilege. The love of property has produced everywhere a system of plunder, which actuates alike the governing and the governed, till society has become little else than a habit of polite pillage, carried on with bows, and curtseys, and counterfeited complacency. As soon as the secret of making wealth became known, Appropriation, like a sordid stepmother, appeared; she accumulated into masses that which ought to have been diffused like the fertilizing dew and the invigorating sunshine. Partiality she made her prime minister, by whom favourites have been elected, and they get much for doing nothing, at the expense of those who get next to nothing for doing a great deal. Society is divided into the idle and the industrious; alas! there is a division yet more invidious, those who enjoy everything and do nothing, and those who want everything, even the work which they would willingly do to keep life and soul together; to be willing and able to work is now not enough; the mere privilege to labour must be purchased by interest and favour. Sloth and superabundance have made the former class wanton; exercise and necessity have made the latter ingenious: the one has contracted a vicious appetite for variety; the other exists under an unfortunate obligation to administer to that appetite. Labour and invention, from the honourable office of supplying the necessaries, comforts, and embellishments of life, are debased to the task of devising luxuries and emblazonments. Trinkets for the vain, toys for the weak, and things yet worse for the vile, degraded industry is compelled to produce, or be quite starved, as it is now half-starved. An insane waste of the best powers of one portion of the human kind is made to create and keep alive the worst propensities of another portion of the same species. There is in all things an equitable reaction ever in operation, and injustice on one side makes injury contingent on the other: thus the debasement of the poor reacts to the degradation of the rich. The pale victim of an unhealthy trade, (a crying evil, which, when men feel and think properly, will cease to exist; for there is no real necessity for such trades— they are ever in the pay of some of the artificial wants of enervating luxury,)—the pale victim of an unhealthy trade labours for some pale victim of indulgence: the toiler is surrounded by children squalid and listless, or desperate and vicious through want; the idler, by children feeble and effeminate, or, perhaps, equally desperate and vicious through excess. In the home of the one every feeling and faculty is stunted or stimulated, paralysed or provoked, according to the strength with which nature has furnished its inmates to endure or defy the injuries of fortune in the home of the other all is abundance, or rather superabundance, with all the toys and contrivances which supersede the exercise of intellect, disturb judgment, distract attention, excite the passions,-in fact, with all the moral impoverishment that excess of money often produces. The young victims of want, and the young victims of wealth, alike, at their destined hour, swarm into the fields of life. There they necessarily encounter each other they are naturally brethren, but politically foes, and conflict is the consequence, sometimes open, oftener covert. Their pursuits are severally, it might be said mutually, pleasure and pillage for these are frequently convertible terms-the pleasures of the libertine and the gambler surely deserve no better name than the pillage of the pander and the pickpocket. Deceit and credulity, artifice and indolence, are all upon the scene; and the strange transitions inevitably attendant on such a state of things (which, under the denomination of the hope of rising, and the fear of falling,' is held to be so admirable) necessarily occur. The poor man's son springs, by some means or other, into wealth and power; the rich man's son sinks into want and infamy. For the civil war of life the former is often better educated than the latter; is frequently possessed of energies unknown to the supine inheritor of fortune. The pupil of poverty has often craft, where the disciple of wealth has only credulity, and credulity of the worst kind-that of erroneously believing himself to be a very superior creature. Thus the one will be subtle and servile, where the other will be vain and haughty. The first fights for all that makes life desirable; the second only seeks something to render it endurable; the one is starving, the other surfeited; the one is fierce and self-dependent, the other effeminate, and dependent on the services of others. What, in the long run, as is familiarly said, must be the issue of such arrangements? That which exists -wretchedness. The rich are almost as remote from happiness as the poor;-for where there is uncertainty there must be fear and solicitude; and where they are, happiness cannot be. Luxury and misery have now, it might be imagined, reached their extreme points, and St. James's and St. Giles's are as complete antipodes as it is possible for them to be; but the universal impression made by these revolting and unnecessary contrasts. bears a new character from one important circumstance, which is, the general disposition to look into the constituents of human nature-the general disposition to perceive that physical wants, moral affections, and mental capacity, have equal claims to satisfaction, enjoyment, and exercise in every class; and that, as regards these, if there be not, and perhaps never will be, the equality which an extreme philanthropy proclaims, there is no such inequality as conventional rule pretends. Men are now weighed by another standard than they were of old, when the husbandman and the artisan were held to be, by divine decree, little better than beasts of burthen, and monarchs and nobles were deemed, by divine right, something more than demigods. The slow but sure progress of time, has accumulated evidence that strikes even purblind prejudice. When the observer looks around for beauty, where does he find it? Only among the privileged in courts and cities? Does the anatomist perceive a fine organization to be exclusively confined to the wealthier classes? Does the moralist discover the virtues and affections only in the circles and homes of opulence? No, no. However long the present gross and unequal division of the goods of life may continue, they will never again be held as right or necessary. The people are rising in the moral scale, and, to preserve anything like the ancient order of things, their conventional superiors must rise in proportion; but they have too long been satisfied with a factitious elevation to have much power or disposition to attempt taking a real one; and if they did, as nature, when given fair play, is no respecter of persons, they could not secure being the fleetest in the race or the strongest in the battle. Also vain, weak, and fatal, will be all attempts to repress those who are resolved to rise-as the weight of pressure, so will be the force of resistance; and woe to the instrument of such attempts-the boiler is the first sacrifice to an explosion. The holder of power is too often like an intoxicated man; as insensible of impending danger as of reason or justice, he does not see that his own true interest consorts with both, and that he had better concede like a relenting brother than be conquered like a reluctant brigand. So inebriated has power become, that it has ceased to make oblations at the shrine of hospitality, which once prompted the wealthy, on occasions, to cast wide the castle gates; to people the ancient hall with guests of all degrees, who in the generous revel forgot griefs and forgave injuries. Now absenteeism proclaims the sympathy which the rich and titled entertain for their suffering fellow-countrypeople: the former are perhaps in the predicament of Curran's aunt, whom he described as holding the petitions of the poor with one hand, wiping her eyes with the other, and not having a third to put into her pocket; of course the objects of her commiseration went unrelieved. Printing, the great agent of the diffusion of knowledge, has truly been the poor man's friend; it has come on like a steamvessel, running down all the petty craft that opposed its way. But there is a power greater than this, of which this is only one of the engines; that power is education. Education is the only equalizer as far as human kind can be equalized, THAT will do it. It is a universal interest-let it be a universal aim. M. L. G. NOTES ON THE NEWSPAPERS. Taxes on Knowledge. The coincidence of the revival of this subject, (which had been drifting towards oblivion,) with the reinstatement of the Melbourne ministry, is fortunate. There is a pithy article upon it in the Edinburgh Review,' ascribed to the pen of Lord Brougham; by whom, also, a petition has been presented from a number of respectable and intelligent inhabitants of the city of London, and whose advocacy of the repeal of the stamp duties may, from these symptoms, in addition to his valuable evidence before a Committee of the House of Commons given just at the close of the last Session, be confidently anticipated. In other and less conspicuous quarters there exists a determination which renders the ultimate result certain, and by which it may, perhaps, be materially accelerated. It is not a subject on which any loud and general outcry is likely to be raised; but it is one on which most intelligent and truly patriotic persons feel strongly; and a decided loss of character was incurred by the Whig administration from the manner in which it was disposed of during their four years of office. They have now an opportunity for retrieving themselves, the neglect of which will be most unpardonable. For obvious reasons the present daily press is cold or hostile towards the repeal; but in the popular press, which would be created by the repeal, the agents of good government would find such a support as effectually to raise them above the machinations of interested faction. One most important portion of the good which would eventually be realized by the repeal of the duties is hinted at in the petition and in the article referred to, but it has scarcely yet been fully developed; we mean the effect of cheap newspapers in advancing the general intelligence, and raising the mental condition of the most numerous class. They would soon become not only the reporters of political and legal transactions, and the organs of |