other way than on the principles of universal justice, benevolence, and wisdom, are the effects of enthusiasm, madness, or hypocrisy. God works not by partial, but by general laws. His power is unlimited, and his rules are immutable; that power has given to the inhabitants of this earth riches abundant. The inexhaustible stores of the earth and sea are more than sufficient continually to afford to man every comfort that his health requires, and every necessary that his numerous life-springing progeny requires. But man, civilized and rapacious, with a degree of selfishness disgraceful to any tribe of the brute creation, claims for a few members of the great family of the universe the whole of this globe, that God made for the support of its inhabitants! Well, these favoured sons of Fortune have got the land divided amongst themselves." What use do they make of it? They do not cultivate it. No, they must have slaves to cultivate it, and these slaves cannot make it produce sufficient to satiate their luxurious masters! More than its produce, in many instances, is extorted from the cultivator, yet all, all is not enough to gratify the idle sons of pampered greatness! Innumerable are the plans laid to reduce man to poverty and distress, and to retain him in misery and degradation. They have succeeded; the free-born sons of England are now objects of compassion, not to the Americans only, but to the Jamaica slaves! Good God! Have the legislators who brought on us these calamities no sense of shame? Are they not endowed with natural feelings of pride like other men? Will the Nobles of our land for ever revel in luxury, whilst the producers of that luxury and their famishing families are objects of compassion, even to West Indian slaves? Oh yes! It is an axiom with the Legislature, that every conquered rebellion doubly fortifies the State against which it was raised. Hence, insatiable avarice cannot be satisfied with the utmost the people can pay, though that payment exceeds by twentyfold what a moderate Government would require; hence the foundation of re-. bellions are laid, and rebellions are often matured by the Government itself, which raises the armies for that purpose. This is precisely the state in which we were placed in the last rebellion; that sanguinary conflict in which the sons of Erin fell in countless numbers; in which the sword of the son pierced the breast of the father, and the spear of the father entered the sides of his children Famihe, war, confusion, dire beyond expression, with a countless train of evils, chased the inhabitants of that land from one end of the island to the other; and when human nature indignantly strove to divest itself of some of the weighty chains that Despotism had forged for it, the tyrants arrayed their armies against the defenceless, and thus forced them to arm in their own defence! The bloodhounds of war once let loose, cities smoked, villages burst into flames, and legal murder slew its thousands

and tens of thousands! Devastation was called loyalty; and the earth was drunk with the blood of the peacefully-disposed agriculturists, who but for the political intrigues of statesmen, would have lived in peace, and would have died surrounded by their friends in the peaceful cottage. But the eye tires, surveying the fields of blood that flowed to gratify the ambitious projectors. of war. The world was then deeper sunk in ignorance than it is now; Priestcraft, the sacred tool of Ministers, had then an unlimited range of authority over the human mind. It could satisfy a man's conscience, making him believe that it was meritorious to cut his neighbour's throat because he wore such a coloured handkerchief. But the dark age of this party-coloured religion is gone by for ever! We see churchmen of every creed exempt from the common trials of humanity; they are arrayed in purple and fine linen; they fare sumptuously every day; and the present political state of affairs recognizes but two ranks, the exceeding rich and the extremely poor. Whilst the country is groaning under the most intolerable burthens, in mockery of the public opinion, deriding the cause of perishing humanity, his Majesty's Commissioners are adding millions to the national expence by the erection of new churches! Great God! Art thou pleased with that sacrifice which is made in erecting temples to thy honour at the expence of famishing millions? Can the blood-stained offering be acceptable to that Deity who is all purity; whose most glorious attribute is universal beneficence, and whose beneficence to the destruction of famishing thousands is in the erection of these temples perverted? No! such works always were, always will be a mockery, a solemn mockery of the Deity, as well as a national robbery of all ranks who contribute to them.

But, my beloved fellow-sufferers, the misery we endure, the degradation we are loaded with, arise, in the first instance, from the voluntary surrender of our minds to the guidance of weak or wicked men. Religion ranks as the commander-in-chief, who marshalls innumerable hosts, in all ages and in every country, against the divine gift that God to man bestows, namely, reason. Man, forgetful of the dignity of his nature, and of the natural privileges he should enjoy, being taught to despise what alone can make him hold his pre-eminence over the other creatures of the earth, loses by imperceptible degrees this sacred guide! A false and spurious system of education is imposed upon him; he is taught to revere his fellow-man, and to almost pay him divine honour; he is taught to believe that God is capricious, cruel, and unjust, a being who created and is continually creating beings for the purpose of making them miserable; to believe that man is himself hell-deserving, and by divine justice only entitled to suf fer eternal tortures. Such are the lessons instilled into the minds of youth, but oh! for what purpose? I will tell you, my fellow

sufferers, for the purpose of making the human race tamely submit to every burthen that senates may impose. They who claim hereditary privileges over their fellow-creatures, strictly enjoin us to fear God-to honour the King. But why should God be feared? He is a being of infinite goodness; and therefore he commands the love of the universe. His most glorious attribute is beneficence, by which he has made a rich provision for all the inhabitants of the earth. Its eternally varying surface, its fruitful, teeming womb, its inexhaustible mines abounding with innumerable comforts of life, the deep caverns of the sea, the immeasurable extent of fruitful oceans-all, all from pole to pole around this glorious orb form the universal estate, to which, by God's law, by the immutable law of nature, every industrious and ingenious man is entitled. Labour is the only purchase-money that nature demands in return for these inexhaustible treasures, that are sufficient through countless ages yet to come to spread health, cheerfulness, and abundance, through myriads of millions of bappy human creatures yet unborn. But look, my brave, enlightened brother slaves! look at what man has done for the human race; he has exalted his fellow-creatures to the rank of Kings: he has formed a Nobility, established a Clergy, and proclaimed from pole to pole that none but the idle and voluptuous shall taste the riches of nature, that none but the useful, the virtuous and industrious shall feel the extremes of want! These are the glories of slavery, of that slavery which we sometimes, (striving to cheat our understanding) vile sycophants as we sometimes are, celebrate as British freedom! Yourselves are famishing; your children are dying of want! In the midst of plenty, the breasts of the mother are dry, through want of nourishment; the babe sickens and dies at the breast; the sinews of the labourer's arms are dried up; and in the harvest season Want is slaying its -thousands and tens of thousands!

Such, oh! my beloved fellow-slaves, is the frightful state of your agriculturist, your labourer, and your innumerable hosts of tradesmen! But, are these miseries felt by the rich? Do the Kings of Europe, or the proud Aristocracies, which have robbed and enslaved the human race partake of our wants? Do they experience any of the evils with which our parents, wives, and tender offspring are afflicted? No, no! they are of Royal and of noble blood; to pamper each of these a thousand children and four hundred parents at least must starve! This is the state of misery that princely power has entailed on the world, Surrounded by abundance, every luxury and every life-nourishing necessary is the property of the Lords of the creation only! In recompence for these privations, we are governed by them! Excellent Governors! wise and prudent Administrators! the dying song of nations is faintly chaunting your hymns of praise! the

eyes of famishing millions are turned towards you! and the thanks of an expiring nation, of that nation that you have beggared, is continually ringing the death peal in your ears!!!

33, Brownlow Street, Drury Lane.

MICHAEL ROUGH, Schoolmaster.

ON THE POOR LAWS.

A PERIOD of distress is the most proper time to agitate all questions of importance to the labouring class, because at such a time men are more inclined to pay attention to them. Population, Poor Laws, Corn Laws, and Free Trade, are subjects which ought now to be canvassed in every periodical publication; while the evil, the distress of a large portion of our fellow-men, meets our eye in one page, the causes and projected remedies should appear in the next.

The founders of the present system of Poor Laws supposed that no man ought to suffer want, and these laws were made to secure means of subsistence to all. At the present day the general belief is that these laws will, at least, prevent absolute want of the necessaries of life; and they are moreover lauded as composing a very charitable system. In the following pages I shall endeavour to show:-First, that they were founded on an absurd supposition as to their necessity; and in this section I think I shall be able to prove that to legislate to compel one man to furnish the means of subsistence for another is an act, not of charity, but of injustice. Secondly, that these laws were designed to accomplish what they never could nor ever can accomplish; but on the contrary that their direct tendency is to extend the evil they were designed to destroy. Thirdly, that these laws may be repealed without injuring the happiness or prosperity of the people, although many assert that this cannot be effected but by the most dreadful sacrifices. And lastly, that there are measures, independent of legislation, which, if adopted and carried into execution, would in part, if not wholly, answer the purpose for which the Poor Laws were constructed.

1. These laws were founded on a supposition that no one ought to be allowed to suffer want: and this, of course, includes the supposition that want could be prevented by legislation: that is, in other words, that every man has a just claim upon the community of which he is a member for the means of subsistence when he cannot obtain them by labour; that the community are in justice bound to supply him; and that they can do so at all times.

I shall first dispute the right here claimed, which I cannot do better than by asking a question. On what is this right founded? Can any one show why he ought to be supplied with the necessaries of life when he cannot procure them by labour? Let me not be understood as saying that a man in distress ought not to be relieved: I am only endeavouring to show that he has no right to such relief. Charity is a noble feeling; it does honour to the breast which contains it, and, when properly directed, is highly beneficial to society; but the sufferings of our fellow-men, when we are forced to relieve them, do not awaken this feeling, but on the contrary they deaden or destroy it: nor do those who receive the relief feel any gratitude for it, because they have been led to believe it their right; and instead of thanking their benefactors, they generally curse them as penurious, under an impression that the givers withhold a portion of that to which the receivers have a just claim. A real charity produces fine feelings, pleasurable sensations, both with the giver and receiver; but a forced charity produces the contrary feeling: the first helps to bind, the last to separate, society.

In order to prove the non-existence of the right to support, I will endeavour to show the progress of a community in the production of paupers: Suppose a number of people to inhabit an Island, and that they equally divide the land and support themselves by their labour. Here the right of each man is that and that only which his own portion of land produces, and which may be more or less according to his knowledge and industry. His only claim on the community is that this right of property may be kept inviolable; and his duty to secure the same right to every other. It is clear that this right of property is the foundation of all good laws in every community, and that when governments were first formed they were solely for its protection, each member of the community paying his share to support the executive, whose duty it was to protect the rights of all.

Now suppose that one man neglected to cultivate his land and wanted the means of subsistence, what could he allege in support of his claim to subsistence from others? He could only say, "I want," and his neighbours would reply, "Go then and labour as others do; those who are idle deserve to suffer want." They would certainly not encourage idleness by giving relief. But suppose another in want, from sickness or accident, and it is almost as certain that relief would be afforded. These are the first paupers, and our mischievous system of Poor Laws promises a provision for both.

Let us suppose a few generations passed away, and then look at this community again. Some families have not increased their numbers, and still possess the first share of land undivided; others have doubled them, have divided their lands, and by hard labour are able to gain a subsistence; others have increased