must shrink back rebuked, and die in the bosom of the child. With the parental the fraternal tie is simultaneously relaxed; and the petty emulations of childhood, like the petty emulations of manhood, soon convert brethren into rivals. Where there is no feeling of kin, there will be no true feeling of kindness, though there may exist capricious likings as well as dislikes. The sanctities of home, like other sanctities, are at best too easily secularised; and a household which has never been swayed by a genuine spirit of parental love, is as a world would be without a ruling Providence or a God.

We have remarked that, in comparison with yet graver calamities, a disproportionate importance has sometimes been attached to the political evils of pauperism. And yet the most important of them has seldom been regarded. We allude to the decay of Patriotism. Insubordination and discontent are dangers which at least admit of being distinctly scanned, if not permanently repressed. A decline in the patriotic sentiment is an injury more dangerous because more insidious. Negative evils are ever those which least admit of cure. With the domestic affections that patriotic sentiment, which encompasses and unites the great family of the nation, must, at all times, proportionably decline. We hear little now of that cosmopolite philosophy, once popular, which inveighed against the narrowness of the domestic affections as inconsistent with patriotism, and against patriotism itself as a limitation of what man should cultivate universal philanthropy. The old truth has fought its way back again into the light; and few now deny that it is through these narrower and deeper channels that the human sympathies advance in their course, till they overflow and fertilise wider fields. What is it that makes a man's country sacred to him? The fact that it is the enlarged and multiplied image of his childhood's home. We call our country patria or fatherland, because, with a paternal providence, it had provided for our earliest wants, before we ourselves became acquainted with them; and because, with a paternal discipline, it continues to marshal the order of our lives and duties. The charities of neighbourly life, the genial enjoyments of friendly society;nay the amenities of hill and dale, and the stillness of sheltered nooks, - whether confessionals of the heart, cells for study, or retreats whence youthful aspirations direct their steadiest flight; these things, together with the manners of our country, her traditions, and her language, enter into our constitution like a mother's milk, and disperse themselves through the remotest currents of our being: But such associations would have no centre to cling to, if the great idea of Country had not already

1850.

Effect on the Patriotic Sentiment.

7

grown up in us beside the domestic hearth; and that idea will be realised, only in proportion as the filial and parental relations have been realised. The fraternal tie not less flings its glorified reflection upon the farthest horizon of our native land. Our fellow countrymen are our brethren, not in name only, but in truth; and it may, without profaneness, be said, that he who does not love his brother whom he hath seen, can hardly love his country which he hath not seen.

There are other influences likewise which aid in building up the patriotic sentiment.-But they too proceed mainly from the moral sense and from the imagination; both of which have a chance of being hurried and hustled out of the world, by the selfishness and want of leisure which accompany over-population, and the high-pressure system it gives rise to. Morally, a man is attached to his country by the benefits she has conferred on him,—by the large degree in which his daily toils, if rightly directed, subserve her interests and promote her greatness,-and by the fact, that it is in and through her that Providence has bestowed upon him his place in universal being, here and hereafter. But what benefit has his country bestowed on the Pauper? She feeds him, and loathes him. Not seldom her best intended charities produce or add to his degradation; her most needful restrictions in the exercise of such charity, entail upon him privation and insult: finally, she buries him. How has he promoted her welfare in return? He has added to her burdens, detracted from her glory, and preyed upon her strength. He has been, at best, the weed cumbering her garden, and the moth fretting her garment. What cause has he to be grateful to her for the part which she has given him in existence? Will he not rather say with our first parent:

'Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man?'

And assuredly the imagination will, in his case, as little as the moral sense, minister to patriotism. He who is a blot on his country's present well-being, can have no care for her past or future greatness. From that high imaginative fellowship which binds together, throughout the breadths of space and the long succession of time, the children of one sea-girt isle, he was excommunicated, before he was born. As well might the mildew claim to be the leaf, as he claim a place, from the lowest root to the topmost spray, in his country's tree of honour.

It is the wide diffusion of pauperism, as well as the depth within our personal nature to which it descends, that renders the

cure so difficult. Its economical evils may be limited; but the habitudes, tone of sentiment, and mode of perception which it engenders, rise from the lower level, and infect all classes of society. Those who are themselves morally diseased are not the best physicians. They are apt to take indulgent views of dangerous symptoms; and good advice, especially if founded on pecuniary considerations, does not always come with a good grace from those who, in the estimate of the party receiving it, may be pleading for their pockets.

We have heard of innumerable plans for meeting the evil;home colonies-the allotment system-the settlement of paupers on waste lands; but such plans have ever proved fallacious or wholly insufficient, when compared with the magnitude and progress of the evil. Still wilder schemes are broached. Quadrilateral communities and social parallelograms have been devised, by philosophers whose mathematical skill has not yet succeeded in squaring the circle of existence. A more rational solution of the problem has a very different class of men for its advocates; their reliance is on abstinence from, or on the postponement of, marriage. That imprudent marriages are always objectionable, not only on economical, but on moral grounds, is abundantly certain; but there is surely no inconsistency between this proposition and another not less important, namely, that when prudent marriages commonly mean marriages unnaturally deferred, society must be in a state not favourable to virtue or to happiness. The proposed remedy, however, need not, at present, be discussed, in any point of view except that of its practicability and sufficiency. In times of actual famine, both population and marriages will be rapidly diminished, without the aid of any advice. As to the effect of such counsels at other times, we may form some judgment from the fact, that perseveringly as they have been bestowed during the last half century, they have been but sparingly acted on, where needed most. The amount of the evil is itself one reason why it cannot thus alone be remedied. The prudential check, as recommended, supposes a high standard of life: while one effect of our large population is, that we sink to a low one. Among men habituated to privation or dependence, all but the necessaries of life will be classed among unattainable luxuries. Life is short, but social suffering is long; and the traveller cannot afford to wait for the only refuge open to him, till the stream of national pauperism has flowed past. The hope deferred' is not the hope that makes the heart strong; and when no other comforts exist for a man, he is driven upon the most sacred, although at the risk of desecrating them. One of the

1850. Proposed Cures for Pauperism— their Inefficiency.

9

evils of a depressed condition is, that lending itself alike to indolence and recklessness, it surrenders to the impulse of the moment, and renounces that graver happiness which sows that it may reap. In Ireland, as we shall see hereafter, it is in the most wretched districts that population has hitherto advanced most rapidly. In Switzerland and Lombardy, on the other hand, in which there exists, not a mere labouring population, but a class of peasant proprietors, and generally a comfortable yeomanry, the rate of increase has been slow. Frugality, foresight, and self-denial, whatever place they may occupy in the scale of virtues, are qualities not produced in any country by poverty and wretchedness. In other words, the high standard of life by which population is to be kept in due proportion with the means of subsistence, must be a standard which actually exists, and not one which we simply wish to exist. 'Cannot people,' it will be asked, 'be educated to it?' The instruction of schools may improve, but can neither reverse nor supersede, the far more efficient education which comes from daily life. A man is educated by every thing he sees and hears, from the time he wakens to the time he goes to sleep and so long as the training of daily habits and of social relations leads directly to pauperism, the best that can be hoped from a merely literary education is, that it will not drive a chronic disease to a premature and perilous crisis.

A remedial measure, of late powerfully advocated among us, is the creation of a class of peasant proprietors. Such a scheme has much to recommend it, and on many grounds. Whether it might or might not lead to the most reproductive investment of capital, it would not only increase the security of property by widening its basis, but it would elevate the condition of the people, by breeding up an important class in habits of dignified yet unambitious independence. Such a class cannot, however, any more than an order of nobility, be created by a fiat of the State. It must win its spurs. Most desirable indeed is it to remove all obstacles to its existence, all impediments, for instance, to the sale of estates in small portions, thus enabling the frugal and self-denying to invest their savings in land. The first requisites for the success of such a class must be energy and agricultural skill. Their peculiar position as proprietors, would, of itself, foster either industry or indolence, according as the one quality or the other preponderated in the parties; and if, therefore, instead of gaining that position in the course of a fair rivalship between the small and the large capitalist, they were suddenly and arbitrarily raised by the interference of the State, consequences the reverse of those hoped for would probably ensue,

consequences more analogous to those which have been witnessed in Ireland in the case of old and immoderately long leases. This is especially to be remembered, when schemes are put forward binding together the establishment of peasant proprietors with the reclamation by the State of Irish waste lands. The endeavour to effect two objects together would be likely in this instance, as in many others, to prove incompatible with the right execution of either. The new proprietors would be exposed to the severest trial in being planted upon wild land, ever apt to relapse into heath and swamp; and they would at the same time be deprived of those incitements and aids which, were they scattered among the community at large, they would derive from the example of their neighbours. Moreover, the lands in question would not, even after a vast expenditure of capital, be capable, according to ordinary calculation, of sustaining more than half a million of persons; and it is to be borne in mind that, if peasant properties be not small indeed, their first tendency must be to stimulate the increase of numbers, however at a later period they may restrict it.

Let us look the evil then, boldly in the face; for thus only can we estimate the magnitude of the remedies required. It advances with our prosperity, until our moral writers speak with bitter scorn of that enchanted gold' which makes all things barren. It advances with our growing knowledge, until our philosophers † confess with remorse, that hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the 'day's toil of any human being.' It advances with our political reforms, the latest of which leaves behind a discontent the more dangerous because less capable of being appeased. It advances in spite of our efforts to promote the cause of religion and of education. One new church is built where four might seem necessary; and yet it remains half empty: new schools spring up day by day; yet so rapid is the increase of crime that how to dispose of criminals, now that the colonies refuse to feed on our offal, is a question which our most thoughtful statesmen strive in vain to resolve. So great, in short, is the evil, that some economists who solve financial questions on the high priori ground' of theology, refuse to believe it, and 'vindicate the ways' of Providence, after a fashion that Providence speedily disowns, - by boldly asserting that population has not, even in old communities, a tendency to advance more rapidly than production. This doctrine finds a ready acceptance

* Carlyle, Chartism.

† John Mill, Principles of Political Economy, vol. ii. p. 312.