the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye, that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the face of the

poor?

But the worthy barrister has been far surpassed by the Rev. Henry Melville, who has proclaimed from the pulpit the astounding discovery that the extension of manufactures is in some way or other a contravention of the moral purposes of Providence in the government of this world. Here is Ego et Deus meus with a vengeance. The reasons for this extraordinary declaration, so far as any reasons can be discovered⚫ in the crowd of words with which it has pleased the orator to cloud his meaning, are the increased demoralization of a population when it is collected into a limited locality, and the greater difficulty of attending to the spiritual wants of a large flock than a small one. Obviously insufficient as these reasons are to bear out the monstrous assertion which has been based upon them, it is worth while examining them and seeing how far they are in accordance with fact. Now, is it at all a proved fact that a rural population is more virtuous, moral, and orderly than a town population? I know that such a notion is a very general prejudice-a remnant of the old infidel fallacy, started as a novelty, though it is as old as the hills, by Rousseau in the last century, that the life of the savage is more natural, and therefore more virtuous, than that of the civilised man. But our concern is with the facts; those which best illustrate the

subject have been collected in the Constabulary Report, and they certainly give the balance of morality to the towns. Judicial returns and police reports mislead inaccurate reasoners, for these documents are to be regarded not merely as comparative estimates of crime, but as comparative estimates of vigilance of police. Suppose that there was a locality—and I happen to know one-so thoroughly demoralised that crime excited no notice or attention, and where guilt was protected by a tacit but almost universal association of the inhabitants, its criminal returns would present a perfect blank, but no one who knows the place would thence infer that it was the most moral within the seas of Britain.

But we are further to consider how much of the immorality of dense masses of population is to be attributed to manufactures. In the name of common sense, what would they be without the manufactures? I have shown from authentic documents in the preceding Letter that a very small portion indeed of the delinquency of Manchester can be traced to the factory population, and I am disposed to place more reliance on the statistical report of Sir Charles Shaw, who is well acquainted with the matter, than on the statement of Mr. Melville, who knows nothing about it. But I can go much farther; I can show by indisputable facts that factories have a decidedly moral influence. Take the examples of Hyde, Turton, Hollymount, and other manufacturing villages, where

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the annual proportion of crime is considerably less than one in a thousand. I have a high respect for Mr. Melville, and I do not believe that, when he hazarded his incautious assertion, he was aware of the unjust imputation which his words implied against the manufacturing population. But he did not the less malign the operatives because he did so unintentionally, and he has not the less made it a duty imposed upon me, to state, as the result of much laborious inquiry and very patient examination of evidence, that, in soundness of moral principle and propriety of moral conduct, the operatives of the Lancashire factories fully equal the average of any other class or order in the British empire. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished that those who turn the pulpit into a chair of political economy should first endeavour to make themselves acquainted with the elements of the science and the facts of its statistics.

There is much truth in Mr. Melville's second reason the magnitude of the factory population has outgrown the powers of the machinery at the disposal of the Church of England. But is it not obviously wiser to extend and increase that machinery than to set about a crusade against factories, which is as foolish, to say the least of it, as Don Quixote's crusade against windmills? It is a very dangerous thing for an orator to allow his rhetoric to run away with his logic and with himself also; in the present instance unbridled rhetoric has carried the rider into

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calumnies which he probably never meant, and which, whether he did or not, are wholly unmerited by the class he has assailed.

Let me add that these are not the times in which it is the most prudent thing in the world-apart from all considerations of propriety or justice for persons who speak with authority to use reviling, contemptuous, or opprobrious language to the operatives of Lancashire. They have borne much; but there is a Hindoo proverb which says that "The shaft of contempt will pierce through the back of the tortoise," and the skin of the operative is not quite so thick as the shell of that very respectable animal. Perhaps it would be well if certain pulpits would exhibit less of political economy and more of Christian charity,that charity which "vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth."

LETTER XV.

London, July, 1842.

WHILE writing up my notes, and suffering at the same time under severe indisposition, I have received your Lordship's letter announcing the death of the great and good Bishop of Meath. "My father! my father! the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof!" A greater loss could scarcely have befallen our common church and our common country. His whole life was spent in advancing "Glory to God in the Highest," by the means which the herald angels pronounced, by promoting "peace upon earth, good will towards men." The rule of conduct from which he never deviated was to seek noble ends by noble means; in public and in private his career was the best commentary on his Master's precept, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves," which I ever knew. The blow has stunned me; but "Great and marvellous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, O King of Saints!" "Thy will be done!"