This is but a single specimen from many others of that enlargement which awaits the labouring classes, after that by their own intelligence and virtue, they have won their way to it. With but wisdom and goodness among the common people, the whole of this economic machinery would work most beneficently for them—a moral ordination, containing in it most direct evidence for the wisdom and goodness of that Being by whose hands it is that the machinery has been framed and constituted; and who, the Preserver and Governor, as well as the Creator of His works, sits with presiding authority over all its evolutions.

18. But this is only one specimen out of the many the particular instance of a quality that is universal, and which may be detected in almost all the phenomena and principles of the science; for throughout, political economy is but one grand exemplification of the alliance, which a God of righteousness hath established, between prudence and moral principle on the one hand, and physical comfort on the other. However obnoxious the modern doctrine of population, as expounded by Mr. Malthus, may have been, and still is, to weak and limited sentimentalists, it is the truth which of all others sheds the greatest brightness over the earthly prospects of humanity-and this in spite of the hideous, the yet sustained outcry which has risen against it. This is a pure case of adaptation, between the external nature of the world in which we live, and the moral nature of man, its chief occupier. There is a demonstrable inadequacy in all the material resources which the globe can

furnish, for the increasing wants of a recklessly increasing species. But over and against this, man is gifted with a moral and a mental power by which the inadequacy might be fully countervailed; and the species, in virtue of their restrained and regulated numbers, be upholden on the face of our world, in circumstances of large and stable sufficiency, even to the most distant ages. The first origin of this blissful consummation is in the virtue of the people; but carried into sure and lasting effect by the laws of political economy, through the indissoluble connexion which obtains between the wages and the supply of labour-so that in every given state of commerce and civilization, the amount of the produce of industry and of the produce of the soil, which shall fall to the share of the workmen, is virtually at the determination of the workmen themselves, who, by dint of resolute prudence and resolute principle together, may rise to an indefinitely higher status than they now occupy, of comfort and independence in the commonwealth. This opens up a cheering prospect to the lovers of our race; and not the less so, that it is seen through the medium of popular intelligence and virtuethe only medium through which it can ever be realized. And it sheds a revelation, not only on the hopeful destinies of man, but on the character of God-in having instituted this palpable alliance between the moral and the physical; and so assorted the economy of outward nature to the economy of human principles and passions. The lights of modern science have made us apprehend more clearly, by what steps the condition and the charac

ter of the common people rise and fall with each other-insomuch, that, while on the one hand their general destitution is the inevitable result of their general worthlessness, they, on the other, by dint of wisdom and moral strength, can augment indefinitely, not the produce of the earth, nor the produce of human industry, but that proportion of both which falls to their own share. Their economic is sure to follow by successive advances in the career of their moral elevation; nor do we hold it impossible, or even unlikely that gaining, every generation, on the distance which now separates them from the upper classes of society, they shall, in respect both of decent sufficiency and dignified leisure, make perpetual approximations to the fellowships and the enjoyments of cultivated life.

CHAPTER V.

Adaptations of the Material World to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man.

1. IF by External Nature be meant all that is external to mind, then the proper subject of the argument, in this Fourth Book, should be the adaptation of the Material to the Mental World. But if by External Nature be meant all that is external to one individual mind, then is the subject very greatly extended; for, beside the reciprocal influence between that individual mind and all sensible and material things, we should consider the

reciprocal influence between it and all other minds. By this contraction of the idea from the mental world to but one individual member of it; and this proportional extension in the idea of external nature from the material creation to the whole of that living, as well as inanimate creation, by which any single man is surrounded-we are introduced not merely to the action and re-action which obtain between mind and matter; but, which is far more prolific of evidence for a Deity, to the action and re-action which obtain between mind and mind. It is thus that we have proceeded hitherto in the argument of this work, and have consequently found access to a much larger territory which should otherwise have been left unexplored-and so have had the opportunity of tracing the marks of a divine intelligence in the mechanism of human society, and in the framework of the social and economical systems to which men are conducted, when they adhere to that light, and follow the impulse of those affections which God has bestowed on them.

2. But over and above these adaptations of the external mental world, we have also adaptations of the external material world to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man; and these will chiefly engross our attention in the present chapter -though, if only to repair an omission on the subject of the relative sympathies between man and man, we might previously advert to that law of affection by which its intensity or strength is proportioned to the helplessness of its object. It takes a direction downwards; descending, for

example, with much greater force from parents to children, than ascending from children to parents back again save when they lapse again into second infancy, and the duteous devoted attendance by the helpful daughters of a family, throughout the protracted ailments and infirmity of their declining years, instead of an exception, is in truth a confirmation of the law as much so, as the stronger attraction of a mother's heart towards the youngest of the family; or, more impressive still, her more special and concentrated regard towards her sickly or decrepit or even idiot boy. It is impossible not to recognise in this beautiful determination of nature, the benevolence of nature's God.

3. We hasten to instances of another kind, which we all the more gladly seize upon, as being cases of purest and strictest adaptation, not of the external mental, but of the external material world, to the Moral Constitution of Man.

4. The power of speech is precisely such an adaptation. Whether we regard the organs of utterance and hearing in man, or the aerial medium by which sounds are conveyed-do we behold a pure subserviency of the material to the mental system of our world. It is true that the great object subserved by it, is the action and reaction between mind and mind-nor can we estimate this object too highly, when we think of the mighty influence of language, both on the moral and intellectual condition of our species. Still it is by means of an elaborate material construction that this pathway has been formed, from one heart and