forge-from clothes and silks to iron and steel-let us see what the skill of cunning workmen in metals has done for us. Sheffield gives us knives of every sort-swords, axes, razors, scissors, all of the most exquisite finish, which the most consummate skill can impart to the most perfect material. Steel here glitters like burnished mirrors; there dazzles like frosted silver. Weapons of offence and tools for industry lie side by side, all fashioned as never were tools or weapons since first the sparks flew from Tubal Cain's anvil. Birmingham offers as much iron-work ; locks which would defy the "Forty Thieves ;" specimens of mechanism, perfect labyrinths of wheels, and levers, and cranes. Darliston affords us the model of the mine, whence the raw materials of these wondrous triumphs of industry and science, ore and coal, are wrought from the earth. Colebrook Dale proves that iron may be made ornamental as well as useful; it moulds the stubborn metal into forms rich and graceful as ever sculptor fashioned from clay; it works out statues, and vases, and fountains; goblets as delicately moulded as those which the potter, stationed near at hand, turns from his wheel. Then there are models by the dozen of the steam-engine-that glorious thing-the wizard which has formed half the wonders which surround it-which has put towns upon desert wastes, steamers in unknown seas, and which, labouring for the matter immediately in hand, has whirled tens of thousands to London, from every province of the empire, to gaze upon this accumulated treasury of industry. But we might go on for days and weeks enumerating the contents of the League Bazaar. Let us content ourselves with drawing from them their obvious moral, with recording their silent pleading. They represent Industry; they demand Industry's rights. Here, in this island, are hands and mouths; the labour of the one should be the food of the other. The spirit of Selfishness, powerful for a time, has said "No!" The people may not exchange what their hands have made, for the food which it would bring them. The struggling, honest, willing labour of the masses, is paralysed for the luxurious, selfish idleness of the few! Here, in England, is ingenuity to invent, and strength to execute, industrial achievements such as the world never before saw. Abroad there grows teeming food, the gift of the Deity. We would barter the products of our hands for the products of our neighbours' fields. Selfishness forbids the bargain: backs in one land shall be kept bare, in order that stomachs in another may be kept empty; food shall rot in the fields in this country, because it may not be exchanged for merchandise, mouldering in warehouses in that. But Common Sense, Common Humanity, Common Justice, call aloud, and with a God's voice proclaim, that God's gifts to all men shall not be marred by the foul will of a few; that the industrious shall not starve when there is food; that trade shall be as free as the sun, and the breeze, and the rain; that the great Religion of Commerce, which is civilising, humanising, fraternising the world, shall no longer have a Custom-House for its Church, or a hostile tariff for its Bible! THE LAY OF THE SHUTTLE. BE at him-have at him! "Twill avenge me again. From the crow of the cock till the middle of night See my wife-she is pallid; blue, bloodless her lip; O they think that I weave them a garment of pride: Like a snake 'twill enwreath them, and wrap them in fire: Yet I will not in plot or conspiracy join; 522 MAN AND THE CRIMINAL. PRISON LESSONS. Ir is an occasional custom with the editors of our very old poets and other writers, to devote a place in their works to a list of words and phrases not understood by them; and on which, of course, they will be happy to receive any information. It has struck us that Government might beneficially imitate the practice, with regard to some of those words and phrases which it does not, but as a Christian Government, ought to understand; and which it naturally desires to receive as unanswerable canons, if, through any happy conjunction of erudition and sagacity, their meaning can but be fathomed. We would, then, have each department hang out its own candid and truth-seeking placards. Unexpected information might possibly drop in upon the Horse Guards, in answer to the queries attached to its list of words and phrases not understood, as-Love your enemies. The Board of Trade might usefully put among the words and phrases not understood at Whitehall" A man's life consisteth not of the abundance of things he possesseth." Mr. Barry might be directed to set apart panels on the exterior of the New Houses of Parliament for a kind of daily bulletin of the state of its ignorance upon words and phrases that seem to relate to particular questions about to be debated, but the precise applicability of which, no one, not even on the episcopal bench, can perceive. Thus, one day we might have the Lords inquiring what the phrase "Love one another can possibly have to do with our system of Poor Law legislation, or why the people who have "committed much to them, should, in their distress, only "ask the more" for assistance? on another, the Commons wondering Why man should not live "by bread alone," instead of requiring Ten Hours' Bills to give him leisure to study the "every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"? Why grapes should not be expected from thorns, in the horticultural as well as in the moral or educational world? or, Why the Legislature should be called on to forgive an erring brother seven times, nay, seventy times seven, instead of consign ing him at once to ruin, if not even to the gallows, according to the good old customs, which not only cause so much less trouble, but are sanctioned by the Church itself, whose business it has been and is to expound all gospel truths? And, by the way, what an interesting book might be written upon the philosophy of words! For countless centuries, words, under the semblance of things, have been the constant subject of dispute; why not vary the proceeding by discussing the things that may lie hidden beneath the veil of words? How, for instance, Punishment and Toleration open the whole history of the errors that have embittered life in every stage of its progress; and though we begin to perceive that the very existence of the latter word among us is a satire on our views of religious freedom, we are not yet prepared to acknowledge that the former shows in an equally marked manner how little we have yet understood the true mode of dealing with crime. Take another instance. The word King-in connection with the office of the chief magistrate of a nation—what means that? Why, traced to its origin, we are told "it seems to denote one to whom superior knowledge had given power." Pray, noblemen or gentleman Premiers, chief magistrates of the chief magistrate, pray let us go back to the old state of things, and measure your right to office by the only proper qualification for it. We fear the management of criminals will be but an unfavourable subject to choose for the commencement of such an investigation. Governments, it has been said, never learn: perhaps we may adduce as a new evidence of the extraordinary character of the present era, that now-at last-governments are beginning to learn; though it must be acknowledged, with some of the awkwardness of all adult scholars, and with a good deal of its own peculiar waywardness and self-confidence superadded. The fact is, any governments could not learn; for, like newspapers, they never erred, or at least never confessed error, never were ignorant, or never confessed ignorance. And though it is pleasant to the imagination. to dwell upon such green oases among the shifting sands of knowledge, we are constrained to own there is room for improvement, even where self-confidence generates very little desire for it, very little consciousness of its necessity. Sufficient be it, however, that there is a commencement made. We can wait cheerfally for further advances, seeing that the grand educator-Nature, who has originated the first movement, will doubtless originate all others that may be requisite, and seeing that her teachings are uttered for the instruction of whoever may choose to listen to them. Placing, then, the fullest reliance on her power and tendencies, let us inquire what lessons she has hitherto afforded us, and how we may best obtain her future instructions. The people may then be able to lead the government, since the government will not lead the people: a state of things, to be sure, not likely to last very long; but that is their business who desire honours and stations without their duties and responsibilities, not ours. So now to Prison Lessons. A great lawyer, and in spite of some serious blemishes and inconsistencies of character, a great man, Coke, observed, between two and three centuries ago, "What a lamentable case it is that so many Christian men and women should be strangled on that cursed tree, the gallows; insomuch as if in a large field a man might see together all the Christians that, but in one year, throughout England, came to that untimely and ignominious end-if there were any spark of grace or charity in him, it would make his heart bleed for pity or compassion." Coke, be it observed, refers to that time which, above all others, stands out to the judgment as well as to the imagination as one of the brightest eras of our history. It was the time when a wise sovereign (considered simply in her sovereign capacity) sat upon the throne, Elizabeth; when one of the wisest of all statesmen, Burghley, guided the nationał councils; when the soul of chivalry, divested of its grosser body, the craving passion for war and bloodshed, shone out with a brilliancy unknown even in the pages of a Froissart, in Sir Philip Sidney; when one of the most illustrious teachers of humanity the world has ever seen, Shakspeare, diffused his thoughts like so many irresistible messengers of peace on earth and good-will among men, through the hearts and minds of the community. That was the time of which Coke speaks; that was the time in which he had much occasion so to speak. According to a calculation we have made (founded upon Strype's Record of the State of Crime in a single county-Somerset, in 1596), there were then sent yearly to the gallows between thirteen and fourteen hundred people, making in all for Elizabeth's reign, some 62,000 fellow-creatures strangled by the law. Surely, one thinks, there had been some dreadful error made as to the effect of the absence of capital punishments in previous reigns. Had there not been, we naturally ask, a very lax administration of the law previously, which severity |