ignorance, would have thought herself excused from lending us assistance. She was ready, enough to promise her interest with acquaintance that did not touch her pocket. Oh, what a blessing is a humane and generous heart! How much true pleasure does Mrs. Meadows lose?

Maria is in daily expectation of hearing from Mrs. Ambrose. We are surprised at not hearing from Dorcas. I have written to her, and directed as she mentiqued. I fear the good woman is ill surely my brother is not brute enough to forsake the poor soul as he has

us.

yon

I mentioned in my last the very great and good alteration in Mr. Wentworth's affairs, as told us by the worthy Mr. Johnson. I hope when he writes to him he will inform him that Maria is not married. Oh, Susan, I have great hopes; you can guess what they are. From what I have said respecting my own affairs, I need not add my wishes that and your mother would try to devise some means for my establishment in life. I will accept any thing that is tolerably reputable: any thing almost is preferable to conwill no tinuing where I am, as you doubt join me in thinking. Do not be uneasy on account of my health and spirits; the former is not injured, and I hope I have too much sense and fortitude to suffer the late occurrences to prey on the latter, I remain, my dear Susan,

most

Affectionately yours,

H. VERNON.

[To be continued].

CESERVATION on the Town and MANUFACTURES of MANCHES

TER.

[From the Letters of Don Manuel Alvarez Espiella.-Translated from the Spanish.]

"J. HAD provided us with letters to a gentleman in Manchester; we delivered them after breakfast, and were received with that courtesy which a foreigner, when he takes with him the expected recommendations, is sure to receive in England. He took us to one of the great cotton manufactories, showed us the number of children who were at work there, and dwelt with delight on the infinite good which resulted from employing them at so early an age. I listened without contradicting him; for who would lift up his voice against

*We are aware that the health and

morals of the rising generation are too much neglected in many, though not in all, our manufactories. The Lanark Mills, for instance, are an exception; health, morals, and education being there particularly attended to. Complaints similar to this of Espiella's might be made against almost every employ. ment by which the labouring classes obtain their bread, agriculture excepted. Almost all mechanical employments are less or more detrimental to health: the mode of life of the soldier and sailer might even be attacked if notions of health and morals were pushed to the extreme; but, as we are persuaded that in many of our great manufactories too little attention is paid to the welfare of the individuals employed, and too much to the acquisition of wealth, we may serve the public considerably in calling its notice to this important consideration, by this animated, though, perhaps, exaggerated picture of Magchester.

Diana in Ephesus?-proposed my questions in such a way as not to imply, or at least not to advance, any difference of opinion, and returned with a feeling at heart which makes me thank God I am not an Englishman.

- Mr. remarked that nothing could be so beneficial to a country as manufactures. You see these children, sir,' said he. In most parts of England poor children are a burthen to their parents and to the parish; here the parish, which would else have to support them, is rid of all expense; they get their bread as soon as they can run about, and by the time they are seven or eight years old bring in money. There is no idleness among us: they come at five in the morning; we allow them half an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner; they leave work at six, and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never stand still.' I was looking, while he spoke, at the unnatural dexterity with which the fingers of these little creatures were playing in the machinery, half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion: and when he told me there was no rest in these walls day or night, I thought that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of tor

ment.

These children, then,' said I, have no time to receive instruction. That, sir,' he replied, 'is the evil which we have found. Girls are employed here from the age you see them till they marry, and then they know nothing about domestic work, not even how to mend a stocking, or boil a potato. But we are remedying this now, and send the children to

school for an hour after they have done work.' I asked if so much confinement did not injure their health? No,' he replied, they are as healthy as any children in the world could be. To be sure, many of them as they grew up went off in consumptions, but consumption was the disease of the English.' I ventured to inquire afterwards concerning the morals of the people who were trained up in this monstrous manner, and found, what was to be expected, that in consequence of herding together such numbers of both sexes, who are utterly uninstructed in the commonest principles of religion and morality, they were as debauched and profligate as human beings, under the influence of such circumstances must inevitably be; the meu drunken, the women dissolute; that however high the wages they earned, they were too improvident ever to lay by for a time of need; and that, though the parish was not at the expense of maintaining them when children, it had to provide for them in diseases induced by their mode of life, and in premature debility and old age; the pobr rates were oppressively high, and the hospitals and workhouses always full and overflowing. I inquired how many persons were employed in the manufactory, and was told, children and all, about two ́hundred. What was the firm of the house?-There were two partners. So! thought I-a hundred to one!

We are well off for hands in Manchester,' said Mr.-; manufactures are favourable to popula tion; the poor are not afraid of having a family here, the parishes therefore have always plenty to apprentice, and we take them as

1

fast as they can supply us. In new manufacturing towns they find it difficult to get a supply. Their only method is to send people round the country to get children from their parents. Women usually undertake this business: they promise the parents to provide for the children; one party is glad to be eased of a burthen, and it answers well to the other to find the young ones in food, lodging, and clothes, and receive their wages. But if these children should be ill used !' said I.-'Sir,' he replied, it never can be the interest of the women to use them ill, nor of the manufacturers to permit it.'

It would have been in vain to argue, had I been disposed to it. Mr. — was a man of humane and kindly nature, who would not himself use any thing cruelly, and judged of others by his own feelings. I thought of the cities in Arabian romance, where all the inhabitants were enchanted: here Commerce is the queen witch, and I had no talisman strong enough to dis-enchant those who were daily drinking of the golden cup of her charms.

We purchase English cloth, English muslius, English buttons, &c. and admire the excellent skill with which they are fabricated, and wonder that from such a distance they can be afforded to us at so low a price, and think what a happy country is England! A happy country indeed it is for the higher orders; no where have the rich so many enjoyments, no where have the ambitious so fair a field, no where have the ingenious such encouragement, no where have the intellectual such advantages; but to talk of English happiness is like talking of Spartan freedom, the

Helots are overlooked. In no other country can such riches be acquired by commerce, but it is the one who grows rich by the labour of the hundred.-The hundred human beings like himself, as wonderfully fashioned by Nature, gifted with the like capa cities, and equally made for im mortality, are sacrificed, body and soul. Horrible as it must needs appear, the assertion is true to the very letter. They are deprived in childhood of all instruction and all enjoyment; of the sports in which childhood instinctively indulges; of fresh air by day, and of natural sleep by night. Their health, physical and moral, is alike de stroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting task-work, by a confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms, by the particles of metallic or vegetable dust which they are continually inhaling; or they live to grow up without decency, without comfort, and without hope; without morals, without religion, and without shame; and bring forth slaves like themselves to tread in the same path of misery.

The dwellings of the labouring manufacturers are in narrow streets and lanes, blocked up from light and air, not as in our country, to exclude an insupportable sun, but crowded together, because every inch of land is of such value that room for light and air cannot be afforded them. Here, in Manchester, a great proportion of the poor lodge in cellars, damp and dark, where every kind of filth is suffered to accumulate, because no exertions of domestic care can ever make such homes decent. These places are so many hotbeds of infection;. and the poor in large towns are rarely or never

without an infectious fever among them, a plague of their own, which leaves the habitations of the rich, like a Goshen of cleanliness and comfort, unvisited.

This system is the boast of England-long may she continue to boast it before Spain shall rival her! Yet this is the system which we envy, and which we are so desirous to imitate: but Heaven for bid that the clamour of philosophising commercialists should prevail, and that the Spaniard should ever be brutalized by unremitting task-work, like the negroes in America and the labouring manufacturers in England! Let us leave to England the boast of supplying all Europe with her wares; let us leave to these lords of the sea the distinction of which they are so tenacious, that of being the white slaves of the rest of the world, and doing for it all its dirty work. The poor must be kept miserably poor, or such a state of things could not continue; there must be laws to regulate their wages, not by the value of their work, but by the pleasure of their masters; laws to prevent their removal from one place to another within the kingdom, and to prohibit their emigration out of it. They would not be crowded in hot task-houses by day, and herded together in damp cellars at night; they would not toil in unwholesome employments from sun-rise to sun-set, whole days, and whole days and quarters, for with twelve hours labour the avidity of trade is not satisfied! they would not sweat night and day, keeping up the laus perennis of the Devil, before furnaces which are never suffered to cool, and breathing in vapours which inevitably produce disease and death;

VOL. XXXVIH.

the poor

would never do these things un-. less they were miserably poor, unless they were in that state of abject poverty which precludes instruction, and by destroying all hope for the future, reduces inan, like the brutes, to seek for nothing beyond the gratification of present

wants.

How England can remedy this evil, for there are not wanting in Eugland those who perceive and confess it to be an evil, is not easy to discover, nor is it my business to inquire. To us it is of more consequence to know how other countries may avoid it; and, as it is the prevailing system to encourage manufactures every where, to inquire how we may reap as much good and as little evil as possible. The best methods appear to be by extending to the utmost the use of machinery, and leaving the price of labour to find its own level; the higher it is the better. The introduction of machinery in an old manufacturing country ulways produces distress by throwing workmen out of employ, and is seldom effected without riots and executions. Where new fabrics are to be erected, it is obvious that this difficulty does not exist, and equally obvious that, when hard labour can be performed by iron and wood, it is desirable to spare flesh and blood. High wages are a general benefit, because money thus distributed is employed to the greatest general advantage. The labourer, lifted up one step in society, acquires the pride and the wants, the habits and the feelings of the class now next above him. Forethought, which the miserably poor necessarily and . instinctively shun, is, to him who g earns a comfortable competence, new pleasure; he educates his 4 X