of paupers who, having resided many years, and formed connexions, were sent home to their parishes, and separated from all friends and consolations, to die in a remote poor-house." Let it not be thought that only a few persons could have suffered from this system, and therefore I magnify its evils, for in the year 1803 the number of persons thus removed was no less than one hundred and ninety-four thousand. I select the year 1803, because it is the only year I am able to ascertain the number removed. I have seen it stated that the average number of removals was not much short of this for many years !

It will readily be seen by the reader, that these oppressive enactments for ages recognized no distinction between innocent and culpable vagrants. "Innocent and culpable vagrants," says Colquhoun, "are confounded together; and the virtuous and the vicious mendicant are subject to the same punishment." They not only made poverty a crime, whose dreadful penalty was exile from home and friends; but these Poor Laws rendered poverty the necessary and unavoidable lot of the working classes, for they limited their wages to the lowest possible rates, and punished the benefactor who gave them more.

Our next inquiry refers to the GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE POOR HOUSES to which generations of the poor were driven.

Colquhoun says" In many places they will be found to be the abodes of misery, which defy all comparison in human wretchedness." More than one Parliamentary Report has styled them, "hot-beds of vice and wretchedness." When the able Report of the Poor Law Commissioners was laid before Parliament, in 1817, Brougham fearlessly declared, that "it unfolded a state of society extraordinary and deplorable, beyond the utmost stretch of the imagination, in a country which laid any claim to civilization!" It is unnecessary to multiply extracts. No person who has any reputation as an author to lose, will deny that the picture I have drawn of the Poor Laws, and their oppressive tendency, is not only true, but that facts could be accumulated, almost without number, proving that a state of things existed worse by far than almost any other ever known in the civilized world. It should not be forgotten too, that the design of these laws, for more than 400 years, was to perpetuate the existence of a slave class in the country, by excluding them from every avenue to wealth, education, and honor. They impoverished the mass of the people by making them work for a bare subsistence; treated their poverty, which had been created by the laws, as a crime; and then scourged the poor victims of tyranny to the disgusting and loathsome home of the pauper, to end an existence filled with suffering and covered with gloom.

The whole system of legislation in England has always been fatal to the morals and the happiness of the lower classes. The poor man loses his self-respect, and all motives to exertion, when the reward of industry is taken away; when, by a false and unnatural order of things, his condition in life is rendered no better by industry, effort, and morality, than by indolence and crime. He ceases to prefer virtue, unless it rewards its possessor, for he knows as well as the priest who fattens on the fruits of his toil, that virtue would be no better than vice, if it did not secure the happiness of its followers. Under the paralysing effects of unjust laws, multitudes, who have toiled on in want, have at last lost all motive to effort, and fallen upon the parishes for support, where, although their privations were increased, they were saved the trouble of providing for themselves. Here the last salutary influence was withdrawn; what little selfrespect may have lurked in his bosom, leaves the Pauper as he steps on the threshold of the workhouse; and in that gloomy confinement, shut out from the glorious objects of creation, his soul, into which the spirit of aspiration and greatness had been once breathed by the eternal Father, is smothered and debased; its existence is almost blotted out; and when it leaves its abused and lacerated house of mortality, the world does not feel the departure, for it has met with no loss. His death is unfelt, unless it may be some brother of misfortune there has had his heart drawn out as to an only friend, and even he is glad when his pilgrimage is over. The pauper dies-his spirit flies, "no marble tells us whither;" and when he is buried, only the few he left behind knew that he ever existed in a green world, where "God has made everything beautiful in his time."

One more illustration will answer our purpose, and I select it from the "CHIMNEY-SWEEP CHILDREN'S" history. At different periods the attention of Parliament has been called to a most brutal practice that has extensively prevailed for a long time in England, of forcing small children into the cruel task of sweeping chimneys. For proof of the barbarities committed, and their extent, I refer the reader to evidence laid before the House of Commons, with which he may be already familiar.

From this evidence it appears that a vast number of children, some of them purchased, many of them stolen, and more obtained from the parish workhouses, have been tortured into premature graves by this terrible business. Says one of these Reports" These children are oftentimes stolen for this purpose. They are very liable to cough and inflammation of the chest, from their being out at all hours, and in all weathers; these are generally increased by the wretchedness of their habitations, as they too frequently have to sleep in a shed, exposed to the changes of the weather, their only bed a soot-bag. They are very subject to burns, from their being forced up chimneys while on fire, and while overheated; and however they may cry out, their inhuman masters pay not the least attention, but compel them too often with horrid imprecations to proceed. They are sometimes sent up chimneys on fire! It is in evidence before your committee, that at Hadleigh, Barnet, Uxbridge, and Windsor, female children have been employed. It is also in evidence that they are stolen from their parents, and inveigled out of workhouses; that in order to conquer the natural repugnance of these infants to ascend the narrow and dangerous chimneys to clear which, their labor is required, blows are used; that pins are forced into their feet by the boy that follows them up the chimney, in order to compel them to ascend it; and that lighted straw has been applied for that purpose ;-that the children are subject to sores and bruises, and wounds and burns on their thighs and knees and elbows, and that it requires many months before the extremities of the elbows and knees become sufficiently hard to resist the excoriations to which they are at first subject. But it is not only the early and hard labor, and spare diet, wretched lodging, and harsh treatment, that is the lot of these children, but in general they are kept almost entirely destitute of education and moral and religious instruction." And this state of things continued with greater or less abuses, and the government slept over it till eighteen hundred and forty, when some measures were at last taken for its suppression; but from what I have been able to learn, I fear with little success.