large towns and the metropolis, where more than one company would be required, they should still be kept perfectly distinct; that just as gas and water are now supplied to the inhabitants of various districts, their honour should be attended to. But I must strongly protest against such a mercantile and degrading manner of viewing the subject. This delicate and aristocratic sense of honour is a thing per se, and must be confounded with no other thing. If it be wished by the rulers of a nation that the feeling should be fostered, the whole system of duelling must be made national, and must be placed under the direct control of government: otherwise if it were abandoned to commercial enterprise, and allowed to be a matter of speculation, the true intent of the institution would be lost in a base passion for making money; one duel-court would compete with another; quarrels would be fomented with an eye to business; rival touters at the entrances of the courts would invite gentlemen passing to come in and have a cheap shot; and every neighbourhood would be set in an uproar by shareholders who would think only of their dividends. By throwing the affair entirely into the hands of government, these corruptions would be prevented. Any anxiety to promote duelling, on account of the money which the duel would cost the individuals engaged in it, must flow entirely from an abstract care for the public revenue-and we all know enough of British human nature in the nineteenth century to be aware, that considerations of that sort would be very unimportant in strength.

But it will further be objected to my whole design that the idea of legalising duelling, and discussing, in open parliament, national arrangements proper to it, is in its very nature preposterous; and that though the custom is, indeed, winked at, it is hopeless to expect that it would ever be plainly recommended to the people at large for adoption. Moreover, that such a publicly-recognised, common-place system-supposing it practicable-would take away the greater part of the excitement which, as matters stand, invests the subject with a charm; and that, besides, by throwing open the duelling-courts to all who could afford to pay for their use, duelling would be completely vulgarised, and, ceasing to be a distinctive mark of social superiority, would rapidly fall into disfavour with those elevated classes who now chiefly practise it.

To the latter, and least important, part of these objections I must reply, that whatever is good for one class must be good for all classes; and that, in the present day, it is vain to expect that

any custom can much longer be preserved as a privilege: if duelling be proper for noblemen, it is proper for coalheavers. With respect to those formidable objections which directly oppose my whole project by asserting that duelling never can be legalised, I can only say that they may be right for anything I know. My proposal is based entirely on the position assumed by the advocates of duelling, that the practice is beneficial; but if they shrink from an open investigation of the question, their position, I maintain, as well as my proposal, falls to the ground. Whatever is beneficial ought, in a rational society, to be legal; and if the representatives of the British people, in Parliament assembled, dare not legalise duelling, or are unwilling to do so, let duelling be considered unbeneficial and no longer be tolerated, or the British people cease to call themselves rational.

A. W.

TEMPTATIONS OF THE POOR.

THE temptations of the poor compared with the temptations of the rich, what are they? Only feathers in the scale, while the opposite side is heaped with gold.

Wealth, power, and fame, these, in the bright sunshine of life, tempt man to their abuse. The poor have no temptations !

Such is the opinion of thousands of their fellow-creatures. Such is the mockery that falls daily from the lips of men who revel in the luxuries of life, while others exist only in their sufferings.

The poor have no temptations: let us analyse this seeming truth, this charitable consideration for the temptation of the rich, this scornful rejection of palliation for the crimes of the poor. Crime undeniably stands forth the same in its glaring form in every order of society; and man cannot safely presume to judge how far circumstances may plead in its extenuation: but the existence of these is often unheeded, the cry of want unheard, the actual presence of destitution unseen and unknown. Men wonder at the crimes of the poor, and forget their temptations.

First and foremost amongst the trials of which we write stands sickness. With the comforts of life scattered in plenty around,

with all that medical aid can suggest, and friends and attendants hasten to effect, disease, in the character it too often assumes, is an appalling affliction. But when it attacks the poor and destitute, when the sufferer is stretched on his wretched mattress, his uncovered limbs shrinking from the chilling atmosphere, when the selfishness of his own sorrow is struggling in his heart with the fear of contagion for those around him, when he knows that if the spirit of life flies from its forlorn tenement, he leaves behind him desolation and misery, spread among the few he loves; and if he bears up against the disease, it may be months before he recovers his strength and is enabled to return again to his labour. Is not this temptation? or rather, is not the heart of the man who, from his bed of sickness, can contemplate this, possessed of greater strength, in faith, in hope, than belongs to much of human nature? The facts we purpose giving to the reader are, for the most part, gleaned from our own experience.

The father of a young and numerous family, who (with the exception of the eldest son) were dependent on him for support, was seized with an infectious fever. The family, occupying two small and ill-ventilated rooms, could scarcely hope to escape contagion, and were thrown for support upon the exertions of the eldest son, who had hitherto been employed as a labourer. Information of the contagious nature of his father's disease had, it appeared, been given to his employers, who, apprehensive that its poisonous breath might already have tainted the son, dismissed him from their service, and sent him forth a beggar. The boy-for he was scarcely sixteen years of age-in the recklessness of despair committed a theft, for which he was afterwards tried and transported.

We will give another instance which occured in a manufacturing district, where the sufferings of those who could obtain no labour were beyond all parallel. A weaver, whose wife had recently died, had striven hard to procure the necessary comforts for his child, a girl of twelve years of age, who was sinking fast under the ravages of consumption. Her situation had proved to the utmost the truth of the observation, "that but for the poor, the poor might perish" their neighbours, in equal want to themselves, did the little that lay in their power to assist them; but, at last, even such aid was exhausted, and the father, who had watched over his child for hours, felt that if nourishment were not quickly procured, not a vestige of hope remained. He hurried

out into the crowded streets of a populous manufacturing town. The means of support were obtained: the inscrutable eyes of Providence alone saw that it was not by honest means. returned with a heavy heart to his wretched dwelling-place. child was dead.

He

His

Next in the scale of human sufferings stands hunger; and although the rich may often be the victims of disease in its mitigated form, this pang, that scares the most enduring fortitude

from the human breast, can never assail them. Not so with the poor. Long, very long, will a man strive for his family against hunger. Long will he ward off the coming evil, and labour early and late to shield them from it. But it approaches graduallyso very gradually, that when he looks on his scanty board, and watches the altered looks of his children, he yet tries to persuade himself that real want stands afar off, and that the strong arm of industry will protect him from it.

It is painful to all but those whose hearts have become hardened, in their contact with the world, to observe the sufferings of mankind most painful of all to witness the privations to which the children of the poor are subject. Often does the hunger of the parent remain unsatisfied, that the children may not feel its cravings; often is every article that can be spared from their own clothing disposed of, that bread may be provided for them: but yet it comes-want, in its darkest garb, and crushes and breaks the spirit that would resist it.

There is an instinct about children most inexplicable. They watch with eager eyes the progress of desolation, not flinching from it until the sharp pang of hunger comes, suffering their privations uncomplainingly, clinging to the last, in their very helplessness, to the hearts that cherish them; and when the heavy day comes, and the little that sufficed to sustain them is no longer to be procured, and the hopeless sob upon the mother's bosom, the cry of anguish that bursts from her lips, speak of the destitution that hovers around; then comes the temptation, creeping like a thing of sin and death around the heart-the fainting mother, the famished children, the utter misery of their condition, the bitter self-upbraiding thoughts of the morrow, added to the day when the beings that man has made dependent on him are perishingGod is not this temptation?

Let it not be thought that this picture is over-drawn for the purpose of palliating the crimes of the poor. It is coloured by

the hand of truth. It presents not one-third of the frightful, heart-rending misery, to which they are subject it spares the reader scenes of destitution, which the eye that observes closely, and grows accustomed to each gradation of poverty, alone can contemplate. The simple but forcible narrative of the weaver Thom, which has already been made public, will illustrate its truth. He wandered with his family, in the snow, from parish to parish, obtaining little or no relief: and when at last, from the charity of a farmer, they found a roof to shelter them, the eldest child, who had pined daily, and sunk to the extreme of weakness died; for the succour had come too late.

"If the lower orders be distressed," is the frequent observation, "let them go to the workhouses. Each man contributes according to his means to the support of the poor." It is even so. They fall into the abyss of pauperism, their names are erased from the book of men; by accepting the enforced charity of their fellow creatures they are bound hand and foot to their degraded condition, and the few remaining links of sympathy existing between the comparatively rich and the poor are destroyed by one blow. Very few are the cases on record in which men (setting aside families) have ever left the workhouses and returned to the labour of their hands. The cause cannot exist in a love of idleness, or a repugnance to labour, for the tasks allotted to each man in the union or workhouse are frequently greater than if he were striving for his bread, and sometimes totally beyond his strength; but it is caused by his degradation, even among those who are almost as deeply stricken by poverty as himself; to use his own expressive words," he never holds his head up in the world again." Who then with the feelings of humanity can urge to the poor this last and crushing resource? The means of ameliorating their condition is the object that the wealthier portions of the community should have at heart; and these are not to be procured by increasing the number of pauper asylums, and erecting fresh barriers in society.

Let the

Thus much we can state from our own experience. poor be distressed to the very utmost, the last fragment of bread that they possess they will share with their neighbours in affliction. They have mercy on each other. The hidden destitution whose demoralising effects are showing themselves daily and hourly, exists in the manufacturing towns, in the metropolis, and in its environs. For here the temptations are greater; the means of