their carnings, they are under the necessity of studying to please those who employ them. If they fail in pleasing those who employ them, they are dismissed from their service. When employment is the only resource for subsistence, this is a sufficient security for the endeavour to please. The most natural and usual mode of pleasing the man by whom another is employed, is to perform well the service for which he is employed, and to observe a quiet and obliging deportment. This is the natural and useful influence of the rich over the poor; an influence which wholly tends to good; to render the poor more productive members of the community, and more civilized and agreeable associates. It is attended with an equally salutary influence over the rich. As the rich man is at liberty to dismiss the servant with whose conduct he is displeased; the poor man is at equal liberty to abandon the service of the master whom he dislikes. The master who behaves with more than the usual harshness or insolence to his servants will be abandoned by every good servant, who is sure of a more agreeable situation. He must either submit to be served by the worst class of servants, those who would not be employed by a better master, or must pay higher to keep a good servant than a better master would have any occasion to pay. The fairness and completeness of this competition is good every way; it tends to make men both better masters and better servants, and increases the happiness of both the orders of men. Observe how fatally this salutary order of things is broken in upon by the baneful operation of the poor laws. The dependence of the labourer is no longer upon the good opinion of his employer. His conduct may be so bad as to procure his rejection at the hand of every employer; and still he has an ample resource at his command. This has an unavoidable tendency to make him indifferent how he pleases his employer; to make him first perform his work imperfectly; and next, to be insolent when he is blamed for it. The poor laws are a contrivance to disjoin the interest of the poor from their duty; to render them independent of a good character, and of the favour and good will of their superiors. It has a certain tendency, therefore, to make them regardless of their superiors; and to produce towards them contumely and insult whenever there is the smallest temptation to it.

IV. REMEDIES.

We did intend to have occupied the greater part of this article with the discussion of remedies. But the inquiry into

the extent of the evil, with the inquiry into its causes and consequences, have carried us so far, that we must postpone the greater part of this important topic till another opportunity. We shall barely suggest a few of the most obvious particulars, that we may not appear to have neglected the subject.

It is necessary to premise, that with a view to present utility, palliatives, we believe, are what it is alone of immediate importance to suggest. A radical cure, till the minds of our countrymen become more solicitous about the improvement of their political institutions, and more aware of the blessings which it would bring, it is altogether vain so much as to hope for.

The discussion, through which we have already passed, will unavoidably suggest one pretty important remedy, or at least palliative, to the evil of pauperism, by which the country is now so heavily pressed. What we allude to will easily be understood to be the blessing of peace. So many of the causes which operate with a fatal tendency to accelerate the pace at which pauperism grows, arise from war, that the salutary return of peace must at any rate greatly retard that fatal progress, and save us from the rapid increase of the destructive malady. We shall on a future occasion produce reasons to show, that the extraordinary increase of pauperism which has taken place during the last 40 years, has taken place, we believe, the whole of it, since the commencement of the destructive war in which we have been engaged since 1799. How deeply then does it import every man who has any regard for the best interests of his country; we say not a regard for the increase of its wealth, that is to say, the increase of means for the employing and maintaining of its people, of the means of lessening the burthens and increasing the comforts of families, though it is for these comforts that people labour, and even make war, and institute and maintain governments, and in fact perform almost all the operations of life; they are, therefore, at any rate, of some importance: how deeply, we say, does it import every man to turn most seriously his thoughts towards peace, who has any regard for the moral worth of his country; for the prevalence of valuable and honourable, rather than destructive and disgraceful qualities in the great body of the people! How deeply does it import us to cultivate a favourable leaning towards that salutary event; an earnest desire to profit by every favourable opportunity for attaining it; a disposition to do every thing in our power to smooth the way to it, and to remove, as far as depends upon

us, every possible obstacle to it! How deeply does it import every man who is thus impressed, to do whatever lies in his power, to spread the sentiments by which he is actuated, till, if the government should unhappily show a different tendency, the public voice become too powerful to be resisted!

Another important remedy, a remedy going far towards the root of the evil, as suggested by the preceding discussion, would be the removal of that fatal, and ruinously operative example which is held up to the mendicant disposition of the people, in the servile and voracious spirit of the leading orders of the community. It is astonishing how far an erect and truly independent spirit in the great body of the elevated classes, a manifest repugnance (as a degrading act) to touch the public money when it has not been fairly and honourably carned, would go towards implanting manly sentiments, a desire to maintain themselves, and a repugnance to partake unduly of the public money, in the great body of the people. It is equally astonishing how far that base disposition to prey upon the public, which is the leading characteristic of our elevated orders; and that rampant servility which is practised as the best means of getting at the prey, must operate upon the minds of the people, and reconcile them to the analogous corruption and vileness. But to cure this disposition in the leading orders, there must be a radical cure in the vices of the government, from which that disposition receives its nourishment. The vices of the one, and the vitious disposition in the other, stand to one another in the relation of cause and effect; and cannot be removed but in conjunction.-The when, the how, the wherefore, &c. with regard to that reinoval, are questions which, not lying within our sphere, we must, however important and however urgent, leave to others.

There is one other remedy so important, that we cannot leave it unmentioned even here, though we have had occasion already to treat of it largely in other points of view; and shall not neglect it on other occasions. It is very evident that whatever has a tendency to elevate the common people in their own estimation, to give to each of them a feeling of personal value and worth, and an ambition to possess and improve that value and worth, must have a truly inestimable force in lifting their minds above the level of pauperism, in rendering it hateful to their imaginations, irreconcileable to their ideas of their own dignity, and in giving them the strongest disposition to avail themselves of all their industry and frugality to save themselves and their families from such a state of degradation.

It is impossible to conceive any one thing capable of producing nearly so much of this salutary effect as education. A man who can read and write feels himself a different sort of being, in a different stage of existence, from the man who cannot. In the books which he reads, (and books of a still better and better sort might be daily provided for his reading,) his mind gets nourished with ideas of what is becoming; and that which is base becomes more hateful from the contrast.-The more all other remedies for the cure of the colossal evils of pauperism are out of our power, the more does it behove every one of us to exert his utmost efforts to forward the inestimable work of the education of the poor.

On Food, and the Means of obviating the Effects of Scarcity.

IN a country where the supply of food is obviously deficient for the population, under the existing management of the internal resources of that country, two subjects present themselves to the Philanthropist, of great and vital interest.

1st. The means of obtaining the greatest quantity of nourishment from the present stock of provisions.

2dly. The means to be adopted for increasing the quantity of food so as to equal the wants of the inhabitants, and to render them independent of foreign nations for a supply.

We shall confine our observations pretty much to the first proposition for the present, though many of the remarks will necessarily have a strong bearing upon the second.-In doing this, we shall avail ourselves of those practical hints which have been afforded at different times, by persons well qualified for the task, from long experience in the management of large establishments. On a subject of this importance mere theory is dangerous; it is only upon the result of judicious experiment that we can safely rely.

It may perhaps be amusing to some of our readers who have not paid much attention to physiology, and not altogether foreign to our subject, if, before we enter into the consideration of the properties of various kinds of food, we should give some account of that important process by which it is brought into a state capable of nourishing and supporting the human frame.

It is a remarkable fact, that the most skilful physiologist has not been able to detect the least difference between the blood of

a Bramin, who lives wholly upon vegetables, and that of a Laplander whose food consists almost exclusively of animal substance. How heterogeneous soever food may be, provided it be digestible in the human stomach, it is converted into the same milky fluid called chyle. The principal elements of the human body, the bones excepted, are carbon, or the substance of charcoal; hydrogen, or the base of inflammable air; azote, which in the state of gas forms three-fourths of atmospherical air; and oxygen. It is true that many saline as well as other substances are contained in the fluids of the human body; they are, however, comparatively in small quantity.-The bones consist principally of lime and phosphoric acid. All these substances are constantly undergoing changes.-A system of vessels called absorbents are perpetually carrying away, not only fluids which have become useless, and whose detention would be injurious, but the more solid parts, and even the bones:-beside this, a large quantity of carbon, amounting, according to some experiments related in the Philosophical Transactions for 1809, to several ounces in the day, is given off from the lungs in the process of respiration.If this perpetual expenditure of substance was not counterbalanced by a regular supply, emaciation and death must soon be the consequence.

The attraction of the particles of carbon, hydrogen, azote, oxygen, and other elementary substances in organized bodies, is peculiarly modified, while the living power, whatever that may be, exerts its energies: hence compounds are produced in the living body, totally different from those which the same particles would form under other circumstances. When an animal or vegetable is dead, the elementary particles attract each other in their natural order, and form simple or binary compounds. Thus, hydrogen and azote form ammonia or volatile alkali; carbon and oxygen, carbonic acid or fixed air. Hydrogen dissolving a small portion of sulphur forms sulphuretted hydrogen, and with the ammonia occasions that very disgusting smell observable in the decomposition of animal and some vegetable substances: a portion of the azote, if circumstances favour it, combines with oxygen and forms nitric acid. A part of the hydrogen also combines with oxygen, and forms water. The complicated structure of an animal is thus after death broken down into a number of more simple compounds, which furnish the pabulum of plants: but when animal or vegetable substance is taken into the stomach, these combinations are prevented by the energies of the living body, a different arrangement of the particles takes place,