THE POOR ABOUT US.

T must be admitted that we live in very comfortable times; that is, for the rich and the wellto-do. The baron of old, with whom romantic young ladies sometimes fall in imaginative love, was not half so well off as regards "creature comforts" as the small tradesman of to-day. The duke in King Richard's days never wore such linen, such comfortable shoes, or dined upon such excellent mutton and vegetables, as the man of the middle classes of to-day. His house was not so well ventilated, his windows did not give so much light, his person was not so safe, as that of a little provincial attorney, who, by the necessity of his position, is forced to spend his useful life in fomenting petty quarrels, and gathering therefrom sixand-eightpences. Nor was the baron's castle so well guarded. Around the attorney, and around every other subject of the Queen, is drawn a powerful and a magic circle, called the Majesty of the Law, which must not be transgressed, and to guard which, inviolate and untouched, twenty-six millions of British subjects are ready to die. As regards actual comfort, plenty, food, warmth, clothing, travelling, and all the little

happinesses of life, there is absolutely no choice; the bold baron, shivering in his windy castle, with the edges of his eyes red with the smoke of his wood or his peat fire, is absolutely nowhere the benefits are all on the side of the tradesman, or attorney, or middle-class man of modern society, who, having done very little towards the good of others, is yet borne upwards as the mass moves, and gathers all the benefits of the workers and thinkers of the past.

Such a reflection as this is enough to make us thankful and prayerful, even if we are not very great, or rich, or clever. But there is another side of the question, which should make us more so. Certain portions of society are very much better off; but there are others which are perhaps worse. There is a ragged fringe on the robe of society, woven though it be in purple and gold and silver tissue, and of many glorious colours, which should make us shudder whilst we think of it. Let us take London, the largest and richest city in the world, and see what we find there.

In London alone we have, we are told, 16,000 children trained to crime; 15,000 lazy, hulking men, too cowardly to be desperate, who live by “cadging" and low gambling. There are no fewer than 5000 receivers of stolen goods, and 150,000 men and women subsisting by other disgraceful means, which we will not here mention. To hang on to these, and to the charity of well-to-do persons (and perhaps the rogues are the more profuse of the two), we have 25,000 beggars; and these, all added together, will make a very large army, composed of what Carlyle calls the "devil's regiments

"These," says

of the line," of more than 261,000 persons! Mr. George Godwin, in his last book, called, pathetically, Another Blow for Life, “are terrible figures ;" and let us remember that there can be no question as to the fact. Some statisticians would make the aggregate less by 50,000 or so ; some might swell it to more; but, less or more, there is the fact-terrible, startling, appalling. Can it, or some part of it, be remedied?

None of our readers who have caught the true spirit of these Essays can suppose that we have any object before us save that of doing what little good we can in our generation; nor, in doing this, will they imagine that for a moment we could be so injudicious as to array class against class. But when we look downwards, below our own class, we find infinite subdivisions more or less neglected and more or less miserable. The Almighty has decreed that the poor shall never cease out of the land; nevertheless, He has commanded that they shall be tended and cared for in their painful pilgrimage. In following out our own material success, in pushing forward the mighty power of this kingdom, and in developing its astonishing resources, the working classes have often been overlooked, though they have never been wholly forgotten.

In London, for instance, to which the above figures apply, the house-room is woefully insufficient. Through overcrowding, imperfect ventilation, and consequent bad air, both the mind and the body become vitiated. Sydney Godolphin Osborne and The Times newspaper, in excusing Sir George

Grey for pardoning an educated murderer, go so far as to say that, in many instances, it is almost impossible to tell when a man is mad or not, or when his intellect is sufficient to distinguish between right and wrong. This is a very lame and insufficient excuse for a criminal who deliberately planned and committed a murder, and whose position was that of a gentleman. Poor men know very well that, if one of their class had done the deed, he would have been hanged without mercy; but if such an excuse can be put forward at all, surely the poor should have the benefit of it. Where conscience is daily seared, where hunger holds out hourly temptations, where home has no allurements, where religion is unknown, and the words "God" and "Christ" are only names to swear by, we can hope for but little moral feeling, and still less moral sentiment. Down in the east, as well as in the very centre of London, there are places so crowded that three families often sleep in one room. There are some honest people living in these places, no doubt; but the majority are thieves, returned ticket-of-leave men, and such-like. The women are coarse, slatternly, tipsy, singing ribald songs, and dancing wildly. The people, crowded about, are as wild as a set of Indians. The little boys run in and out, darting forward noiselessly on their naked feet, like deer. There seems to be no regular occupation for any of the people: some live by odd jobs; others form the night population of London, and most likely gain their living by robbing when it becomes dark. When there is a "row," or a drunken brawl, the police muster in a strong body before they venture to attack them; and even

then they are often brutally ill-treated, jumped upon, battered and maimed, and oftentimes injured for life. The conductors of religious journals, who describe these localities as affording fit fields of work for the London city missionary, call these people by the romantic name of "London Arabs." They are indeed true sons of Ishmael, for every man's hand is against them, and their hands are against every man.

What we see in one quarter of London is repeated in many other places. It is repeated over and over again in Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Leeds; in fact, in every city of Great Britain. Not only do these people not work, but they hinder others from working. Their cost is enormous. From them the casual poor, and many of the paupers, are annually recruited. Our paupers alone, in the year 1861, amounted to 1,206,269, and these were relieved at the enormous cost of £6,981,291. But that was not all that we spent on them. Such people require to be kept in order; and this can be done only by the English police, who certainly, to do them justice, are the admiration of the world, and on the whole perform their duties admirably. Although we have an army of nearly 21,000 police, at a cost, and really a very moderate cost, of £1,579,200, still they require to be largely increased. But then, to back these up, we have judges and gaols, prosecutions and prisons, costing nearly three millions more, or, altogether, £4,347,700, for the attempt to suppress and punish crime; an attempt, as every one knows, not altogether successful, and punishment very inadequate for the criminal and very heavy for the innocent portion of the community. Then,