ometimes habitual sense of obedience; it is always something that will impress, always something that will be remembered.

Let it not be imagined that I am willing to depreciate the benefits of ordinary juvenile education; I estimate them I trust at their full value, and only say, to the theory of the school, add the practical influences of domestic feeling.

As far as my enquiries have gone, the views here detailed are supported by facts; the children thus bred up wholly apart from their parents, do not turn out well. They have gone a certain beaten round, day by day; they know nothing of life; they cannot conduct themselves in the world; they have never before met with temptations, and they cannot now resist them; they have never felt hardships, and they sink under them. What they have been taught was theory, and when they come to practice, they find their theories wholly disjoined from action. They have the forms of morality about them, but possess nothing of the substance.

The district school as giving rise to a new system of claims, as affording new advantages from the rate, and as educating unlimited numbers in the habit of pauperism, is perhaps amongst the strongest Incitements to parochial dependance, that can be devised. It will at the same time deprive of relief, the very persons most entitled to it; those respectable parents burdened with a large family, who had rather starve along with their children, than endure separation from them.

'The school plan will certainly have a varying influence; it will deter those most respectable families from asking relief; and it will double the clamour of the undeserving. To get rid of one, two, three, four children wholly, and permanently, (for to the child on whom the gates have once closed, they will never be opened till his final exit,) is a stimulus to fraud, idleness, and falsehood, scarcely to be withstood.

• Pride, if not honesty, will prevent many persons from asking relief In a small way, and for a short time; but here is a wholesale temptation addressed to all, and to operate without limit. Should this principle prevail, as the receipt of parochial relief extends, (every man whose child is in the poor house, is a burden to the parish,) all idea of debasement will be obliterated. Where few receive relief, and many do not, it is the many who form the class; the few are the exception. Here, to be of the few is degrading: but where many receive relief, and few do not, the receivers of relief, become the ordinary class of labourers; degradation is at an end; the few may feel a little pride, but the many feel no disgrace.

< The child who is brought up till 14 in a workhouse, must look on the workhouse through life, as his right and inheritance; in all his calamities and necessities he must revert to it, as his almost native home; his ideas will not often rise beyond it, and he can never shrink from it as inflicting disgrace.'

We have dwelt the longer upon this point because it seems to to be a rather favourite idea with the Select Committee, and be

cause the plan has been warmly advocated in a popular Journal, by a writer whose fancy and feelings too often get the better of his judgement. The example of the Jesuits, who insisted upon having their pupils left wholly to their care during the whole time of their education,' has no attractions for us. It was, we know, part of their policy to supersede, and, if possible, extinguish the natural affections as a spring of action, and to reduce their neophytes to a sort of moral automata, the passive members of the vast ecclesiastical machine It must not be forgotten how very recently the rulers of our church,' have discovered that the education of the lower classes is a safe or desirable undertaking, and there is, perhaps, reason to doubt whether that object would long be simply and heartily pursued in institutions of the kind recommended by the Committee. Other objects occupy the prominent place in the mind of many a zealous partisan of National Education, who, but for the deprecated activity of sectarian philanthropy, would have been well content that Dr. Bell had never been heard of out of Madras. We are far from meaning to insinuate, that the Honourable Committee had any other design, in suggesting this plan of providing for the children of the poor, than to secure their moral and religious education; but it behoves us to look at the scheme in all its bearings, to anticipate the certain abuses to which it is liable, to consider it in relation to the spirit of the times, and in relation to other recent measures, such as the Select Vestry Bill, the Church-building Bill, and the District School System, which all seem to be directed to one point, the consolidation of the power of the ecclesiastical body, and the extension of its injurious patronage. Nor will a jealousy on this subject appear wholly unseasonable, when we take into account the attempts which have been made in some instances, to insist upon attendance at the parish church, as a condition of obtaining parish relief. The plan of District Schools would afford an admirable opportunity for silently establishing this exclusive principle, The State would have the authority, we have seen, of the Jesuits, for claiming to have the children it undertook to maintain, left wholly to its spiritual care. And thus they would be fed with the milk of sound doctrine,' from Mother Church, not drynursed,' we are told, in dissent.' Let them be fed by all means; but Mother Church has the character of not being as careful as a nurse should be, respecting either her own diet, or the calls of her children; and what is termed dry-nursing, has been known to turn out much better than the tampering of a high-fed and voluptuous wet-nurse. Whether the infant tenantry of the District work-house should go to Church or not, that is, should be compelled to go, or not, might appear a matter not worth occupying

a moment's discussion, except, indeed, on account of the principle of exclusion; one must rejoice that they would be brought within the reach of any sort of religious instruction; but the plan being so highly objectionable on other grounds, we have reason to regard the attempt to carry it into execution, with the more jealousy, as it seems capable of being made to subserve a sinister and mischievous policy, at a heavy expense to country.

But there is another point of view in which we are disposed to question the propriety of the plan for maintaining the children of the indigent. It assumes that the number of a man's children, is the only proper ground for relief; that this is the consideration by which parish relief ought to be regulated. The children, it is said, must not starve, and upon this principle, the present mode of making up a man's income out of the rate by what is termed bread-money, has been so extensively adopted; a mode in every point of view objectionable. First, there is no security given or required, that the allowance shall go to relieve the wants of the children: the probability is, that part at least will be spent by the parent, in many cases, at the public-house. Secondly, the practice tends directly to abate a man's inducement to industrious exertion, and renders him at the same time careless whether his wife and children should earn any thing or not; the consequence of which is, that they will generally be brought up in unprofitable idleness. To which we may add the remark of Mr. Courtenay, that, the allowance being proportioned to the price of bread, it involves an undertaking to find the best food for the whole population, at all periods, without reference to the 'quantity of corn actually existing.' The first of these objections would be obviated by the separate maintenance of the children; the second, however, would remain in all its force. That most salutary stimulus to exertion, which nature has itself provided in the parental instinct, and which has so important an influence upon the social character, would be by this means greatly superseded; and so far as the Poor Laws are chargeable with favouring improvident marriages, they would still be liable to the same objection. It cannot be doubted, that they who now connect themselves together, relying for the maintenance of their family upon the rate, would look to the separate maintenance of their children, in the same sordid spirit of half-caleulation. Add to this, that one effect of such a regulation must be, to depress the rate of wages, if wages are at all affected by the system of relief, below what ought to be regarded as a just standard. We speak now chiefly of agricultural labourers, whose wages, we must contend, ought to be such as should suffice for the total maintenance of their largest families, unless in times of extraordinary scarcity, which cannot be included in

the consideration. When we say they ought to be, we mean that otherwise they cannot be properly termed a living price for labour. There can be no more reason that the rate of wages should be limited to the subsistence of a small family, than that it should be limited to the support of an unmarried labourer; the latter has as great an advantage over the former, as the former has over the man with a large family; and if it is thought that competition would not, in the absence of the poor's rates, bring down the price of labour to the lowest point, namely, that upon which an individual should be able only to subsist himself, we do not see why its effect is to be dreaded as likely to bear too hard upon the labourer with a numerous family. The mode proposed by the Committee, of relieving a man of his children, would, however, operate just as any other mode of relief has been found to do, in the bargain between the labourer and his employer, inducing the former to accept of worse terms from the latter than be would otherwise submit to; and in the one case, just as much as in the other, the labourer is defrauded of that part of his wages which he foregoes in consideration of the obtainable relief.

The number of children which a man has to support, is in itself no criterion of the need he stands in of relief; that can be ascertained only by taking the number of his children in connexion with his actual earnings and the price of subsistence. One honest hard-working labourer may be reduced to distress, with only a small family, when provisions are high, or work is scarce, while another in the same rank of life may be well able to maintain a family twice as large as his, upon his earnings. The scheme of separately providing for the children, does not pretend to discriminate between cases thus widely different; and the introduction of a rule limiting the relief to those whose earnings should not exceed a specific income, would act as an immediate discouragement of industry. Relief given in this manner, would be all in favour of the improvident and the worthless: it would be taking off what operates as some restraint upon vice and wastefulness, and it would exonerate the careless and unfeeling from the most natural objects of solicitude. It would have this radical defect of the plans it is intended to supersede, that it would give to all as much as any can want; and it would give it upon conditions which would deter the most deserving objects from accepting of it: Mr. Courtenay recommends that the enactment should be to this effect: That it should be a sufficient 'cause to be shewn before the magistrate for not relieving a man • on account of the size of his family, that the overseers had offered to maintain the child in any house, not excepting the ' workhouse, whether in or out of the parish, of which the Petty 'Sessions should have approved as fit for the reception of chil

'dren of the same age.' We cannot conceive of an enactment more liable to be made the instrument of arbitrary power and oppressive partiality.

The Committee see in this suggestion concerning schools, the only cure for the mixture of relief with wages.' Now, it does appear to us, that it would only perpetuate the evil in another form. If the experiment of abolishing this practice is to be tried at all, in order to afford a chance of success, it must be tried as an absolute enactment. Whatever palliatives are introduced with the view of softening down the alternative between wages and pauperism, must, in our judgement, frustrate the efficiency of the measure. The evil to be cured is no other than the extensive transmutation of the wages of labour into the poor's rate; the remedy must involve the conversion of a large portion of the rate into wages. The poor's rate has depressed to an extreme, the market price of labour: this measure would have for its object to force the price up again. But by force it must be accomplished, by circumstances acting with the force of necessity, and the effects of that necessity would extend further than some may dream of. This sudden rise in wages would occasion an immediate deduction in the profits of agriculture, which could be no otherwise supplied than out of the rent. The poor's rate is a tax upon the profits of the farmer, which he would have been unable to sustain, had wages continued at their natural height; which is only saying, that he could not have paid his landlord so high a price for the use of" the land. Rents must therefore have fallen; but instead of this they have been raised at the expense of the consumers of the produce upon which the farmer has obtained his profit, and at that of the payers of the rate. The amount of the poor's rate has, it is true, a tendency injurious to the interests of the landlord, but in no proportion, except under very peculiar local circumstances, has it fallen upon him by occasioning a diminution of rent. It is, in fact, the owner of the soil, rather than the cultivator, who has contrived, by the depression of wages, to escape from the burden of the rate. The rate is, nevertheless, a burden upon the land, which diminishes so much its value, and should this burden be in any measure lightened or removed, as the ultimate effect of abolishing the practice of mixing relief with wages, the owner of the land would be the party to reap the eventual benefit. It is just, therefore, and it would be no less necessary than just, that he should bear the stress of the rise in the price of labour, which the tenant would have to sustain. Rent, then, must be lowered to compensate for the rise in wages: but this is precisely the consequence which many abolitionists of the rate, are the most solicitous to prevent. Nothing short of the labourer's refusing to work, unVOL. X. N. S. 2 N