object of the industry is left more or less entirely to the enjoy ment of the earner. Whatever share of a man's earnings he is obliged to part with in the shape of tax, is so much deducted from the strength of the motive by which he would otherwise be impelled to industry. By this operation the influence of war, of such a war at least as that which we are now carrying on, in impairing the force of industry, is pretty evident. As the taxes, however, which fall upon the people are in general pretty much disguised, being confounded with the price of the articles which they purchase, a little consideration is necessary to see how the taxes affect the industry of that class of the community. An appeal is necessary, not to men so profoundly ignorant of human nature as Mr. M'Kerrel, but to men who have some little acquaintance with that important subject.

It is an experienced fact, that you never obtain from men a continuance of their utmost exertions, by setting before them as the sole fruit of those exertions the bare necessaries of life. The prospect of the bare necessaries of life never constitutes an animating motive. If a man's utmost exertions are necessary to procure him the bare necessaries of life, he will in general prefer obtaining an imperfect share, that he may exert the less. His spirits flag; his strength decays; and his productive powers are impaired. Add even the dread of punishment, and that in any degree, you still fail of your effect. A slave, under any mode of treatment, is a less productive labourer than a free man. This is an instructive fact. To insure yourself of a man's utmost exertions, you must set before him the animating prospect of pleasure, of something to enjoy, of something beyond the mere necessaries of life, of something wherewithal to make himself, and those in whom he delights, happy. For this will he strain every nerve, and for this alone. The tyranny which would obtain his utmost exertions by any other means, is as short-sighted as it is cruel. Witness the sordid sloth which harbours with the most galling poverty under all vicious and oppressive governments!

With this important consideration fully before us, it is not very difficult to trace the ruinous effects of excessive taxation even upon the industry of the general body of the people. By the taxes which come to be mixed with the price of every thing which he consumes, the earnings of every man become gradually able to purchase less and less of what is above the mere necessaries of life. The motive, therefore, which is constituted by the prospect of pleasure, the most animating and energetic of all motives, becomes more and more feeble. As he approaches more

and more to the confines of bare necessaries, the little accommodations and comforts on which what is called appearance depends, the circumstances which gave him a sort of value among his neighbours, and on account of which he set à higher value on himself, are by painful necessity gradually re trenched; the furniture of his house, the clothing of his family, disappear; he is reduced to the garb and the hovel of a pauper; and by necessary consequence pauperism itself ceases to appear à degradation. That by the process which we have just now described, thousands and thousands of the most deserving of the people have been added to the list of paupers, we have not a doubt; nor should we suppose that any man who has had an opportunity of observing the lower orders during the last twenty years, and could attend to what he saw, would hesitate in coming to the same conclusion. We speak not of the idle and spendthrift from their outset. They are prepared for the workhouse without waiting for the operation of taxes. Neither do we speak of a reduction of earnings below the rate of bare necessaries, which, in spite of taxation, can only take place by a diminution of the capital, that is, of the demand for labour in the country;-that part of the case which, for the present, we have agreed to leave out of the account. Whatever should reduce the earnings of the people below bare necessaries must lessen their numbers; but the lessening of their numbers, without any diminution in the demand for their labour, would speedily advance the rate of wages.-Now this approximation by the force of taxes to the sordidness and humiliation of bare necessaries, cannot do less than prepare the minds of the great body of the people for the degradation of pauperism.

The next cause to which we shall advert of the progress of pauperism is the operation of the poor laws themselves. On this we shall have the less occasion to dwell, because the tendency of the poor laws to increase the paupers is very gene rally allowed, and very frequently and largely descanted upon. The case is, indeed, it must be allowed, a pretty clear one. The growth of beggary is, like the growth of most other things, in proportion to the encouragement it receives. Where much is to be got by begging, there will always be many beggars; where little or nothing is to be got by begging, there will be few or none. In those Roman catholic countries in which the clergy had engrossed a very great proportion of the landed property of the country, and in which, to preserve the people in some kind of good humour with the riches and usurpations of the priests, as well as to extend their sway over the minds of

men, it was necessary to expend a certain portion of their vast revenues in the way of charity, and hence large quantities of provisions and other species of alms were daily distributed at the doors of monasteries and episcopal palaces, it has been observed that beggars swarmed. When this source of cha rity was dried up in England, by the suppression of the monasteries, in the time of Henry the Eighth, and by the subsequent changes which the progress of the Reformation introduced, it was in fact to supply the wants thus created, and relieve the beggars whom clerical charity had engendered, and by whom the country was infested, that in an evil hour the famous statute of Elizabeth, which gave birth to the English poor laws, was enacted.

The poor laws, undoubtedly, hold out an encouragement to idleness and dissipation; to that sort of dissipation which is the most common with the poor, and at the same time the most fatal to their happiness and virtue, the use of intoxicating li quors. The motive to make a frugal use of a man's earnings; and to save out of them as much as possible, as a resource against any of the causes of future want, cannot fail to be im paired by the knowledge of a certain source from which all his future wants, without any concern on his part, must of neces șity be supplied. Industry and frugality at the same time; industry and frugality of so severe a sort as are required of the lower orders, are painful virtues; they require all the helps which can be afforded them; and can ill bear to be deprived, by ill-contrived and impolitic laws, of any of the motives which prompt to them. With all those who are disposed to idleness and intemperance, and feel but little shame at the thought of pauperism, that is to say, with all the most worthless part of the labouring poor, that part who least deserve that the public should burthen itself with their support, the prospect of parochial relief must form a determining motive; must confirm their idleness and dissipation, and sooner or later make them infallibly paupers.

At the same time we are inclined to think that the operation of the poor laws, however malignant its tendency, is not of force to produce very extensive corruption, without the junction of other causes. Where every thing dse contributes to place the minds of the common people in a healthful state, the pleasures of independence, the pleasures of holding and retain ing a sort of rank among their neighbours, render the degrada tion of pauperism so hateful, as to overbalance the temptation to indolence and profligacy which the poor laws undeniably

hold out. We believe, therefore, it is found, in the history of this country, that in the healthful periods of the state, in times of peace especially, when the nation most prospers, and the motives to virtue are the most prevalent, the progress of pauperism has in general been suspended. But when other causes are added, sufficient to subdue the feeling of independence, and to extinguish the shame of pauperism, the the resource held out to idleness and profligacy by the poor laws, is a force that impels the rolling mess with precipitation down the hill. When the idleness, the irregularity, the profuse expense which are associated with military ideas, make a deep impression on the minds of the people; when boasting and mendacity, learned from the common practice of governments in time of war, have tainted the minds of the people and estranged them from manliness and virtue; when the pernicious influence of the ballot has deranged their schemes, banished all steady and forecasting views from their breasts, filled the workhouses with the wives and children of its victims, and rendered pauperism the common lot and the common spectacle of the people; when an enormous taxation has reduced the poor to the bare necessaries of life, and brought upon them the squalidness and humiliation of what they themselves call poverty; then the prospect of the workhouse becomes an operative cause, then it multiplies daily the number of burthensome mouths, and spreads the dominion of idleness and profligacy.

There are other more deep-lying causes of the evil of pauperism, the development of which would require a more extensive discussion than consists with the narrow limits of a periodical publication. We may only in general remark, that whatever has a tendency, on the part of the higher orders, to set a bad example to the lower; whatever disposition is betrayed by them which resembles the disposition to pauperism in the lower orders, cannot fail having a powerful tendency to recommend to them that condition; to detach from it the idea of degradation, which is the grand restraint against it. If the higher orders are characterized by servility, it is unavoidable that the lower should take after them, and be beggarly. If the higher orders are observed perpetually labouring and contending for sinecures; striving and struggling with one another to become eleemosynaries of the state; straining every nerve to obtain a share of the property of the community without doing any thing for it; thinking no masses too enormous to satisfy, no pittance too mean to allay their craving, a prime minister of Great Britain (and the brother of a man holding a

sinecure of 33,000l. per annum) being clerk of the irons in the mint, that is, receiving 150l. a year under the false pretence of having something there to do; if the people observe all this, and reflect that the poor rate is only a branch of the general revenue of the state, they unavoidably think that it cannot be more shameful that they should obtain a share of that revenue without any title to it, than this duke and that lord; that mendicity cannot be more degrading in a labouring man than in a nobleman; that it cannot be more disgraceful to crowd the doors of the churchwarden with mendicant demands, than the waiting-rooms of the minister; that if grasping and consuming what men have not earned is good at one end of the social line, it is good also at the other. If any one supposes that these considerations have no influence on the common people, he knows little of the country. The facts are no secret. They form too large and prominent a feature of our political condition. The mendicant competition, in fact, comes down to their doors. From the very steps of the throne, to the threshold of the cottager; from the prince of the blood, to the village gauger, there is one general and never-ceasing conten tion who shall receive most of the public money with least to do for it. When a people have got into this corrupted state, is a propensity to pauperism in the lower orders a thing to be wondered at? a thing avoidable? Is it not the very shape which, in their case, the grand propensity of their betters, the propensity of living upon the public, must unavoidably take?-It is only one of the manifestations of the general corruption, and is incurable except through the cure of the rest. If it be asked, What is necessary to the cure of the whole? this is an important question, and leads far. It ought to occupy every man's thoughts; and hardly any man can fail in giving to himself (to a greater or less extent) a right answer. But the inquiry is too extensive for limits like ours.

III. EFFECTS.

We have now said all that, on the present occasion, we can We are next led to afford to say on the subject of causes. consider a little the question of effects.

It will not, we think, be denied, that one of the effects of pauperism, when its corruption has extended a certain way, is, to afford encouragement, to give augmentation, to itself. It is the shame attached to pauperism, which, in a country where a maintenance is provided for every man that demands it, preserves the whole mass of the people from becoming paupers.