way and that. Presently his eyes ached: his ideas were jostled away. It was impossible to compose while the manual act was so troublesome; it was nonsense to attempt it. Nothing but idleness would do in travelling; so the blunted pencil was put by, and the eye was refreshed once more with green.
But now a new sort of country was opening. The hedges were gone, and a prodigious stretch of fallow on either hand looked breezy and pleasant enough at first; and the lark sprang from the furrow so blithely, that Reid longed to stop the coach, that he might hear its trilling. But the lark could not be heard, and was soon out of sight; and the perspective of furrows became as wearying as making pothooks had been. Reid betook himself to examining the window-pockets. There were two or three tidy parcels for solicitors, of course; and a little one, probably for a maid-servant, as there were seven lines of direction upon it. The scent of strawberries came from a little basket, coolly lined with leaves, and addressed to Master Jones, at a school in a town to be presently passed through. Reid hoped, for the boy’s sake, that there was a letter too; and he found an interstice, through which he could slip half-a-dozen burnt almonds, which had remained in his pocket after treating his own child. What speculations there would be, next holiday time, about how the almonds got in! Two or three other little parcels were disregarded; for among them lay one of more importance to Reid than all the rest,—three newspapers, tied round once with a bit of red tape, and directed, in pencil, to be left at the Blue Lion till called for. Reid took the liberty of untying the tape, and amusing himself with the precious pieces of type that had fallen in his way. There was little political intelligence in these papers, and that was of old date; but a little goes a great way with a solitary traveller; and when the better parts of a newspaper are disposed of, enough remains in the drier parts to employ the intellect that courts suggestion. That which is the case with all objects on which the attention is occupied, is eminently the case with a newspaper—that whatever the mind happens to be full of there receives addition, and that the mood in which it is approached there meets with confirmation. Reid had heard much from the farmer of the hardships which individuals suffer from a wasteful public expenditure; and his eye seemed to catch something which related to this matter, to whatever corner of the papers it wandered.
"STRIKE AT ****** PALACE.—_All the workmen at present employed on this extensive structure ceased work on the appearance of the contractor yesterday morning. Their demand for higher wages being decidedly refused by him, the men quitted the spot, and the works have since remained deserted. A considerable crowd gathered round, and appeared disposed to take part with the workmen, who, it is said, have for some time past been arranging a combination to secure a rise of wages. The contractor declares his intention to concede no part of the demand._" The crowd taking part with the workmen! Then the crowd knows less than the workmen what it is about. These wages are paid by that very crowd; and it is because they issue from the public purse that the workmen think they may demand higher wages than they would from a nobleman or private gentleman. The contractor is but a medium, as they see, between the tax-payers and themselves; and the terms of the contract must depend much on the rate of wages of those employed. I hope the contractor will indeed concede nothing; for it is the people that must overpay eventually; and it has been too long taken for granted that the public must pay higher for everything than individuals. I should not wonder if these men have got it into their heads, like an acquaintance of mine in the same line, that, as they are taxed for these public buildings, they have a right to get as much of their money back as they can, forgetting that if every taxed person did the same, there would be no palace built;—not but that we could spare two or three extremely well;—or might, at least, postpone some of the interminable alterations and embellishments, with an account of which the nation is treated, year after year, in return for its complaisance in furnishing the cash. Let their Majesties be nobly lodged, by all means; and, moreover, gratified in the exercise of tastes which are a thousand times more dignified than those of our kings in the days of cloth of gold, and more refined than those of monarchs who could make themselves exceedingly merry at the expense of their people. The test, after all, is—What is necessary for the _support_ of the administrating body, and what upholds mere _pomp_?
These are no days for public pomp. In one sense, the time for it is gone by; in another sense, it is not come;—that is, we ought now to be men enough to put away such childish things; and, we cannot yet afford them.
Two or three noble royal palaces, let alone when once completed, are, in my mind, a proper support to the dignity of the sovereign. As for halfa-dozen, if they do not make up a display of disgraceful pomp, the barbaric princes of the East are greater philosophers than I take them for. Yes, yes; let the sovereign be nobly lodged; but let it be remembered that noble lodgings are quite as much wanted for other parties.
"_Mr. ——’s motion was lost without a division._" Aye: just so. The concentrated essence of the people, as the House of Commons pretends to be, must put up with a sordid lodging, however many royal palaces England may boast. They are not anything so precious as they pretend to be, or they would not so meanly exclude themselves from their right. They might just as faithfully consult the dignity of the empire by making the King and Queen live in a cottage of three rooms, as by squeezing themselves into a house where there is neither proper accommodation for their sittings, nor for the transaction of their business in Committees, nor for witnessing, nor for reporting their proceedings. I thought my wife quite right in saying that she would never again undergo the insult of being referred to the ventilators; and I have determined twenty times myself that I would despise the gallery so utterly that I would never set foot in it again: yet to the gallery I still go; and I should not wonder if my wife puts away, for once or twice, her disgust at inhaling smoke and steam, and her indignation at being permitted to watch the course of legislation only through a pigeon-hole and a grating. The presence of women there, in spite of such insults, is a proof that they are worthy of being treated less like nuns and more like rational beings; and the greater the rush and consequent confusion in the gallery, the more certain is it that there are people who want, and who eventually will have the means of witnessing the proceedings of their legislators. But all this is nothing to the importance of better accommodation to the members. Of all extraordinary occasions of being economical, that is the most strange which impairs the exertions of the grand deliberative assembly of the nation,—the most majestic body, if it understood its own majesty,—within the bounds of the empire. Why,—every nobleman should be content with one house, and every private gentleman be ashamed of his stables and kennels, rather than that the House of Commons should not have a perfect place of assemblage. I verily believe that many a poor man would willingly give his every third potato towards thus aiding the true representation of his interests. It would be good economy in him so to do, if there was nothing of less consequence to be sacrificed first. But King, Lords, and Commons are not the only personages who have a claim on the public to be well housed, for purposes of social support, not pomp.
"_Yesterday morning, Andrew Wilson underwent the sentence of the law, &c. &c. Though only twenty years of age, he was old in guilt, having been committed for his first offence,—throwing stones at the police,—- when he was in his thirteenth year. He is supposed to have been for some time connected with a gang of desperate offenders; but nothing could be extracted from him relative to his former associates, though the reverend chaplain of the jail devoted the most unremitting attention to the spiritual concerns of the unhappy man._" So this is the way we tend the sick children of the great social family, because, forsooth, with all our palaces, we cannot afford a proper infirmary! As soon as symptoms of sickness appear, we thrust all our patients together, to make one another as much worse as possible, and when any one is past hope, we take credit for our humanity in stuffing him with remedies which come too late. To look at our prisons, one would think that we must be out in our Christian chronology. That among the many mansions of the social edifice, room cannot be found for those who have the strongest claim of all on our pitying love and watchful care,—what a scandal this is may be most fully comprehended by those who have passed from the loathsome confusion of the greater number of our prisons to the silence and rigid order of the very few in which a better system has been tried. There are persons to press the argument that while many of our honest poor, in London and in the factory districts, are crowded together, six or seven families in the same apartment, it cannot be expected that the guilty should be better accommodated. But these same honest poor,—trebly honest if they can remain so under such a mode of living,—may well be as glad as other people that the prisoner should be doomed to the solitude which their poverty denies to them.
These same honest poor are taxed to pay for the transportation of multitudes of the guilty, and for the idleness of all: while the incessant regeneration of crime through our prison methods affords but a melancholy prospect of augmented burdens on their children’s children for similar purposes. In this point of view alone, how dearly has the public paid for the destruction of this Andrew Wilson, and for the offences of the gang he belongs to! Committed in his childhood for the childish fault of throwing stones, kept in a state of expensive idleness for want of an apparatus of labour, thrown into an atmosphere of corruption for want of room to insulate him, issuing forth as a vagabond to spread the infection of idleness and vice, and being brought back to be tried and hanged at the nation’s expense, after he had successfully qualified others for claiming from the public the expense of transportation,—would not the injured wretch have been more profitably maintained through a long life at the public expense? Would it not have answered better to the public purse to give him an establishment, on condition of his remaining harmless? If no Christian considerations are strong enough to rouse us to build new jails, or to transmute the spare palaces of the educated and the honoured into penitentiaries for the ignorant and forlorn, there may be calculable truths,—facts of pounds, shillings, and pence,—which may plead on behalf of the guilty against the system of mingled parsimony and extravagance by which guilt is aggravated at home, and diffused abroad, and the innocent have to pay dear for that present quiet which insures a future further invasion of their security. Every complainant who commits a young offender to certain of our jails knows, or may know, that he thereby burdens the public with a malefactor for life, and with all who will become criminals by his means. What wonder that the growing chances of impunity become a growing inducement to crime? There is no occasion to “provide criminals with port wine and Turkey-carpets;” but there would be more sense and better economy in this extreme,—if insulation were secured,—than in the system which remains a reproach to the head and heart of the community. Ah! here are a few hints as to one of the methods by which we contrive to have so many young offenders upon our hands.
“_John Ford, a publican, was fined for having music in his house, &c.
&c._” “_Two labourers, brothers, named White, were charged with creating a disturbance in the neighbourhood of the residence of Sir L. M. N. O., who has lately enforced his right of shutting up the foot-path, &c.
&c._” “_The number of boats which passed under Putney Bridge from noon to sunset on a Sunday in summer, was computed by the informant of the right reverend bishop to exceed, &c. &c._” "_The witness stated that he saw the two prisoners that morning in the Albany Road, Regent’s Park, selling the unstamped publications which were now produced. He purchased a copy from each of them, and took the vendors into custody. The magistrates committed the prisoners to the House of Correction for one month each, and thrust the forfeited papers into the fire. The prisoners were then removed from the bar, laughing._“ ”_On the discussion, last night, relative to the throwing open of the Museum, we have to observe, &c. &c._“ ”_The prisoner related that his dog having, on a former occasion, brought a hare to him in a similar manner, the gamekeeper had ordered the animal to be shot. The prisoner’s son had then contrived to secrete it; but he could assure the magistrates that the animal should be immediately sacrificed if he might be spared the ruin of being sent to prison._" Considering that one of the great objects of government is the security, and another the advancement, of the people, it seems as if one of the expenses of government should be providing useful and innocent amusement for the people. All must have something to do in the intervals of their toils; and as the educated can find recreations for themselves, it behoves the guardians of the public to be especially careful in furnishing innocent amusements to those who are less fitted to choose their pleasures well. But where are the public grounds in which the poor of our large towns may take the air, and exercise themselves in games?
Where are the theatres, the museums, the news-rooms, to which the poor may resort without an expense unsuited to their means? What has become of the principle of Christian equality, when a Christian prelate murmurs at the poor man’s efforts to enjoy, at rare intervals, the green pastures and still waters to which a loving shepherd would fain lead forth all his flock; and if any more tenderly than others, it would be such as are but too little left at large? Our administrators are careful enough to guard the recreations of those who, if deprived of them, are in the least danger of being driven to guilty excitements. The rich who can have music and dancing, theatres, picture-galleries and museums, riding in the parks, and walking in the fields any day of the week, hunting and boating, journeying and study, must also have one more, at whatever expense of vice and misery to their less favoured neighbours, and at whatever cost to society at large. Yes; their game must be protected, though the poor man must not listen in the public-house to the music which he cannot hire, nor read at home almost the only literature that he can buy. He must destroy his cherished dog, if it happens to follow a hare; and must take his evening walk in the dusty road if a powerful neighbour forbids him the quiet, green footway. Thus we drive him to try if there is no being merry at the beer-shop, and if he cannot amuse himself with his dog in the woods at night, since he must not in the day. Thus we tempt him to worse places than a cheap theatre would be. Thus we preach to him about loving and cherishing God’s works, while we shut out some of them from his sight, and wrest others from his grasp; and, by making happiness and heaven an abstraction which we deny him the intellect to comprehend, we impel him to make trial of misery and hell, and by our acts do our best to speed him on his way, while our weak words of warning are dispersed by the whirlwind of temptation which we ourselves have raised. If the administration of penal justice be a grievous burden upon the people, it must be lightened by a practical respect to that higher justice which commands that the interests of all, the noble and the mean, the educated and the ignorant, be of equal importance in the regards of the administration; so that government shall as earnestly protest against the slaughter of the poor man’s dog for the sake of the rich man’s sport, as the prophet of God against the sacrifice of the poor man’s ewe-lamb for the rich man’s feast. If bible-read prelates preached from their hearts upon this text, we should never have another little boy supposing that he was to be a clergyman, because he went out shooting with his father. Would that such could be persuaded to leave their partridges and pheasants, and go east and west, to bring down and send home the winged creatures of other climes, wherewith to delight the eyes of the ignorant, and to enlarge his knowledge of God’s works! Meantime, the well-dressed only can enter the Zoological Gardens; and the footman (who cannot be otherwise than well-dressed) must pull off his cockade before he may look at that which may open to him some of the glory of the 104th Psalm. We are lavish of God’s word to the people, but grudging of his works. We offer them the dead letter, withholding the spirit which gives life. Yet something is done in the way of genuine homage.
See here!— “_Yesterday being the occasion of the annual assemblage of schools in St. Paul’s * * under the dome * * children sang a hymn * * crowded to excess * * presence of her Majesty, &c. &c._” And here follows an account of certain university prize-givings. We are not without public education,—badged,—the one to denote charity, the other endowments.
If education were what it ought to be,—the breath of the life of the community,—there would be an end of this childish and degrading badging.
At present, this prodigious display of white tippets and coloured cockades under the dome of St. Paul’s tells only that, because the whole of society is not educated at all, a small portion is educated wrong.
There is less to be proud than ashamed of in such an exhibition; and though the stranger from a comparatively barbarous country may feel his heart swell as that mighty infant voice chaunts its hymn of praise, the thoughts of the meditative patriot will wander from these few elect to the multitudes that are left in the outer darkness. Till the state can show how every parent may afford his children a good education, the state is bound to provide the means for it; and to enforce the use of those means by making a certain degree of intellectual competency a condition of the enjoyment of the benefits of society. Till the state can appoint to every member a sufficiency of leisure from the single manual act which, under an extensive division of labour, constitutes the business of many, it is bound to provide the only effectual antidote to the contracting and benumbing influences of such servile toil.
Till knowledge ceases to be at least as necessary to the happiness of the state as military skill was to the defence of the Greek Republics, the state is bound to require of every individual a certain amount of intellectual ability, as Greece required of her citizens a specified degree of military skill. Till all these extraordinary things happen, no pleas of poverty, no mournful reference to the debt, no just murmurs against the pension list, can absolve us from the obligation of framing and setting in motion a system of instruction which shall include every child that shall not be better educated elsewhere. Not that this would be any very tremendous expense. There is an enormous waste of educational resources already, from the absence of system and cooperation. Lords and ladies, squires and dames, farmers’ wives, merchants’ daughters, and clergymen’s sisters, have their schools, benevolently set on foot, and indefatigably kept up, in defiance of the evils of insulation and diversity of plan. Let all these be put under the workings of a well-planned system, and there will be a prodigious saving of effort and of cost. The private benevolence now operating in this direction would go very far towards the fulfilment of a national scheme. What a saving in teachers, in buildings, in apparatus and materials, and, finally, in badges! There will be no uniform of white caps and tippets when there is no particular glory to be got by this species of charity; when none can be found who must put up with the humiliation for the sake of the overbalancing good. When the whole people is so well off that none come to receive alms at the sound of the trumpet, the trumpet will cease to sound. The day may even arrive when blue gowns and yellow stockings shall excite pity in the beholders no more, and no widowed parent be compelled to struggle with her maternal shame at subjecting her comely lad to the mortifications which the young spirit has not learned to brave. This last grievance, however, lies not at the nation’s door. It is chargeable on the short-sightedness of an individual, which may serve as a warning to us whenever we set to work on our system of national education. It may teach us, by exhibiting the folly of certain methods of endowment, to examine others; to avoid the absurdity of bestowing vast sums in teaching plain things in a perplexed manner, or supposed sciences which have long ceased to be regarded as such, or other accomplishments which the circumstances of the times do not render either necessary or convenient. It may lead our attention from the endowed school to the endowed university, and show us that what we want, from our gentlemen as well as our poor, is an awakening of the intellect to objects of immediate and general concern, and not a compulsion to mental toil which shall leave a man, after years of exemplary application, ignorant of whatever may make him most useful in society, and may be best employed and improved amidst the intercourses of the world. Let there remain a tribe of book-worms still; and Heaven forbid that the classics should fall into contempt! But let scholastic honours be bestowed according to the sympathies of the many; the many being meantime so cultivated as that they may arrive at a sympathy with intellectual toil. With the progress of science, the diffusion of science becomes necessary. The greater the power of the people to injure or rebel, the more necessary it is to teach them to be above injuring and rebelling. The ancient tyrant who hung up his laws written in so small a character that his people could not read them, and then punished offenders under pretence that his laws were exhibited, was no more unjust than we are while we transport and hang our neighbours for deeds of folly and malice, while we still withhold from them the spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Bring public education to the test, and it will be found that badgery is _pomp_, while universal instruction is essential to the _support_ of the state.
A pretty new church that! But I should scarcely have supposed it wanted while there is a new Methodist meeting-house on one side the way, and the large old Independent chapel on the other. The little church that the lady is sketching before it comes down, might have served a while longer, I fancy, if the necessity had been estimated by the number of church-goers, and not of souls, in the parish. Whatever may be thought of the obligation to provide a national scheme of worship after the manner in which a national scheme of education is certainly a duty,—however the essential circumstance of distinction is overlooked, that every member of the state has, without its assistance, opportunities of worship, while such is not the case with instruction,—whatever may be thought of the general question of an ecclesiastical establishment,—it is not pretended by any that its purposes are answered by the application of its funds to the augmentation of private fortunes instead of the religious instruction of the people. Time was when he who presented to a _benefice_ was supposed to confer a _benefit_ on the people connected with it. Now we have the public barter of such presentations for gold; and whether most regard be always paid to the qualifications of the candidate or to the gold he brings, let the face of the country declare. Meeting-houses springing up in every village, intelligent artizans going off to one class or another of Dissenters, while the stolid race of agricultural labourers lounge to church,—what does this tell but that the religious wants of the people are better met by the privately-paid than the publicly-paid church? The people are not religiously _instructed_ by the clergy, as a body. Look into our agricultural districts, and see what the mere opening of churches does for the population,—for the dolts who snore round the fire in the farm-kitchen during the long winter evenings, and the poor wretches that creep, match in hand, between the doomed stacks, or that walk firmly to the gibbet under the delusion that their life-long disease of grovelling vice is cured and sent to oblivion by a few priestly prayers and three days of spiritual excitement! Look into our thronged towns, and search in its cellars and garrets, its alleys and its wider streets, how many dwellers there see the face of their clergyman, and have learned from his lips the reason of the hope that is in them,—if such hope there indeed be! They hear that he who holds the benefice, _i.e._ is appointed their benefactor, is living in London, or travelling abroad, on the funds which are derived from the people, and that a curate, found by accident or advertisement, is coming to do the duty. He may be a religious instructor, in the real sense of the term, or he may not. If he be, no thanks to his superior, no thanks to the state, no thanks to the university that bred him! For aught they know or trouble themselves about, he may be more ignorant than many a mechanic in his flock, and more indolent than the finest lady who carries her salts to her cushioned pew. He might have the same virtues that he has now if he were a dissenting minister; and nobody disputes that nowhere does virtue more eminently fail of its earthly recompense than in the church. Nowhere do luxury and indolence more shamelessly absorb the gains of hardship and of toil. The sum of the whole matter is, that in the present state of the church, the people pay largely for religious instruction, which it is a chance whether they obtain. If the same payment were made by the people direct,—without the intervention of the state,—they would be sure to demand and receive an equivalent for their sacrifices. If the people be supposed incapable of thus providing for their own spiritual wants, it behoves the state to see that those wants are actually provided for, so that more than half the nation may not be compelled, through failure of duty in the establishment, to support a double ministry. No power in earth or heaven can absolve the state from the obligation, either to leave to its members the management of their own funds for religious worship and instruction, or to furnish to every individual the means of learning the Gospel and worshipping his Maker.
The first is a plan which has been elsewhere found to answer full as well as any we have yet tried. The last can never be attained by merely opening a sufficiency of churches, and leaving to men’s cupidity the chance whether the pulpit shall be occupied by an ape or an apostle.
Have the people got a notion already of such an alternative?
"TITHES.—PARISH OF C.—_On Monday, the Rev. J. B. H. commenced distraining for tithes due, &c. &c. On that day there were impounded above forty cows. The parishioners offered security for the cattle, which was refused, and they have resolved to let the law take its course. In the mean time, a large military and police force is stationed in the vicinity of the pound. Sentinels are regularly posted and relieved, and the place presents more the appearance of a warlike district than a country village._" Ah! this Rev. J. B. H. takes for his text, perhaps, “I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword.” The people, it seems, think his claim, 1476_l._, on a valued property of 9000_l._ a year, excessive. But his advocate declares that no man, acquainted with first principles, can deny that the Rev. J. B. H. has a legal right to demand and take his tithes. Be it so! But first principles tell just as plainly that it is high time the law was altered:—first principles of humanity to the clergy themselves, to judge by what comes next.
"_The subscription for the relief of the families of clergymen in Ireland proceeds but slowly, though the necessity for it increases with every passing day. Ladies who have been educated with a view to filling a highly-respectable station in society may now be seen engaged in the most laborious domestic offices; while their children are thankful to accept a meal of potatoes from some of the lowest of their father’s flock._“ ”_The widow of an Irish clergyman, middle-aged, is eager to obtain a situation to superintend the management of the nursery in the family of a widower, or as useful companion to a lady, or as housekeeper in a nobleman’s mansion, or as matron in an extensive charitable institution.
She would be willing to make herself useful in any situation not menial, her circumstances being of an urgent nature.—References to a lady of rank._“ ”_A master of arts, in full orders, is desirous of a curacy. He feels himself equal to a laborious charge; and a speedy settlement is of more importance than the amount of salary, especially if there be an opening for tuition._" Alas! what a disclosure of misery is here! among a body which the United Kingdom is taxed to maintain. Poor as the Dissenting clergy may be, as a body, we hear of no such conflicts in their lot. The poor spirit-broken clergyman bearing, undeserved by him, the opprobrium belonging to his church, seeing his gentle wife washing his floor, or striving to patch up once more the girl’s frock and the boy’s coat; while they, poor children, peep in at the door of the labourer’s smoky cabin, and rush in at the first invitation to take a sup of milk or a potatoe! Scraps of the classics, descriptive of poverty, _will_ run in his head, instead of gospel consolations of poverty; for the good reason that he was taught that his classics, and not his choice of poverty, were his title to preach the gospel. He could find in his heart to inquire further of any heretical sect, which takes for its rule to employ every one according to his capacity, and reward him according to his works. However difficult it might be to fix upon any authority which all men would agree to be a fitting judge of their capacities and their works, none would affirm that an educated clergyman is employed according to his capacities in wandering about helpless amidst the contempt or indifference of his flock, or that his works are properly rewarded by the starvation of his family. Then there is the widow of a brother in the same fruitless ministry! “_Any situation not menial!_” “_Her circumstances of an urgent nature!_” One poor relation, perhaps, taking charge of one child, and another of a second; and the third, perhaps, sent to wear the badge of this lady of rank at a charity-school, that the widow may be made childless—may advertise herself as “without incumbrance,” to undertake any situation not menial! Then comes the curate, eager to undertake more than man can do for as little as man can live for;—to use his intellectual tools, framed with care, and polished with long toil, and needing, in their application, all the power of a philosopher with all the zeal of a saint,—for less than is given to the artizan who spends his life in the performance of one manual act, or the clerk, whose whole soul lies in one process of computation! This poor curate, heart-sick through long waiting, may find employment according to his capacities, and above them; but, if he be fit for his work, he will not be rewarded according to it, till those for whom he and his brethren toil have, directly or indirectly, the distribution of the recompense. Bring the church, in its turn, to the test. It is certain that it is made up of pomp and penury; and no power on earth can prove that it at present yields any support to the state.
Since the people have no benefit from a state education, and but a questionable benefit from a state church, how much is spent on their behalf? Here are tables which look as if they would tell something, though it requires more wit than mortal man has to make out accurately how the public accounts really stand. Among all the accommodations provided for the transaction of public business, one would think a payoffice might be fixed upon where all public claims should be discharged, in certain allotted departments; and, among all the servants of government, working men or sinecurists, one would think some might be employed in preparing such a document as has never yet been seen among us—an account of the actual annual expenditure of the public money. But one may make some approach to the truth in the gross:— “_The expenditure for the last year may be calculated, in round numbers, at upwards of fifty millions._” Upon my word, we are a gay nation! If we acted upon the belief held by some very wise persons, that the business of government might be conducted at a charge of one per cent. on the aggregate of individual revenue, this sum total would show us to be rich enough to buy Europe, and perhaps America to boot. This would give us a national wealth which it would be beyond Crœsus himself to form a notion of. But we are far enough from having ourselves governed so cheaply. Let us see how these fifty millions go:— _Superannuated and Reduced Allowances of Civil £1,000,000 Departments_ Here are thirty-four millions and a half devoted to “noneffective” expenditure. This is a pretty triumph of _Pomp_ versus _Support_.—Yes,—pomp: for few will now dare to affirm that our prodigious wars were necessary to the national defence. They were wars of pomp which undermined our supports: and, as for the glory thus gained, our descendants will be ashamed of it long before they have done paying for it.—As for the other items of non-effective expenditure,—the smaller they appear by the side of the enormous debt charge, the more necessity there is for their reduction; since the disproportion proves,—not their smallness, but its bigness. Though they cannot be abolished,—though their Majesties must have a household,—though the other branches of the royal family must be supported,—though retired soldiers and sailors must be taken care of on their quitting a service from which it is not easy to turn to any other,—no man will now affirm