in manufactures, a week or a fortnight without great inconvenience, but the labourer's stomach cannot be kept without food two days. It is very common to talk of wages being regulated by the proportion which the supply of labour bears to the demand for it. Labour is treated as a marketable commodity, and as if the workman was as able to withhold his labour, as the employer is to delay his work. The fact is, however, that the labourer and the employer are in the same position towards each other, when making a bargain for wages, as would be two dealers, the one holding a cargo of corn and wanting a cargo of oranges, and the other holding a cargo of oranges and wanting a cargo of corn. The oranges will be rotten in a fortnight, the corn will keep two or three years. The only times at which the workman is on a par with his employer in making a bargain for wages, is at harvest time, with the farmers, and during an extraordinary period of demand, with the manufacturers. Such periods occur with the manufacturers once in three or four years. On these occasions time becomes equally important to both the employer and the workman. The harvest will be injured if it is not collected within a few days, and the great profits offered will be lost to the manufacturer if his goods be later in the market than those of his neighbours. The favourable point to the workmen at these periods is, that delay is impossible. With such exceptions, in almost all the endeavours of the farmers, master weavers, and spinners, in England, to reduce the wages of the workmen, they have been successful.”—(p. 117-118.)

66

To return now to the case we have supposed. The commissioners and Mr. O'Connell would say:-" You cannot re"lieve the parish containing 1100 distressed persons, because you cannot afford to build an asylum-room for that number, "it would swallow up the whole rental of the parish. The friends of a poor law for Ireland say,-" Build an "asylum for 100, and remove that number from the labour "market. Withdraw 100 competitors for employment,— "restore thereby the due balance between employment and "labour, and you restore at the same time the condition of the "whole population*." Let the reader now judge between us.

The same principle applies to the 2,300,000 distressed persons in Ireland. The removal of a small number would ensure the comfort of the whole, and this point once attained, the beneficial effects which we have shown, must of necessity flow from the change, would speedily begin to manifest themselves. Mr. Revans's plan, be it observed, provides for the relief of one-third of the above number, and for the removal from the labour market of no less than one-fifth of the able-bodied, a number which we conceive to be more than sufficient to produce the desired effect. However, be the

In point of fact there would be (adding the families) no less than 5500 persons in distress relieved by the abstraction of 100 able-bodied labourers; but to be on the safe side, we have confined our reasoning to the able-bodied.

proportion what it may be it one-tenth, or one-fifth, or even one-half (which is impossible)—still the fallacy of the statement adopted by Mr. O'Connell from the commissioners' (third) report, must be abundantly obvious.

The commissioners assume that those who are "out of "work" are in distress. They who cultivate their own holdings must be perpetually out of work, without being necessarily in distress. In Canada, which is half the year under snow, the population are more than thirty weeks out of farm work, but there is no distress in Canada. We cannot conceive the commissioners could be ignorant of this distinction.

But supposing it were necessary, in defiance of what we have shown in a former part of this article, to relieve the whole 2,385,000 persons during thirty weeks in the year, the commissioners have assuredly made a gross mistake in carrying out the calculation. They say the expense would be "something more than 5,000,000l. a year." Now we have seen that 26s. a year would be ample to provide food at least equal to (it would provide much better than) that which the peasant now enjoys. 2,385,000 for thirty weeks are just equal to 1,376,000 for one year; and at 26s. each, the sum required would be 1,788,8007. instead of 5,000,000. The wages of the whole body of labourers "appear, by their own report, p. 6," says the London and Westminster reviewer," to amount to but 6,800,000l. for "the whole year, and the maintenance in the workhouse of "somewhat less than one third of the whole number for thirty "weeks would amount to more than 5,000,000Z."

The heap of measures recommended by the commissioners, requiring a most expensive and complicated machinery, we have not space to discuss; we shall therefore only say, in this place, that they appear to be calculated for no other purpose than to create places, and throw patronage into the hands of the ministry.

One subject yet remains to be noticed as recommended by the commissioners, or rather by eight out of eleven; for three, Messrs. Vignoles, and Naper, and Lord Killeen, dissent therefrom: we mean what is called the "voluntary" system of raising whatever funds may be necessary. The whole of Mr. Revans's exposure of the voluntary system is admirable; it extends from page 133 to 139, and will well repay a perusal. As this is certainly not the worst portion of Mr. Revans's work,

we regret that we cannot extract the whole; we must therefore content ourselves with selecting a few of those passages which are most conclusive against this "fantastic principle."

"The grand argument of the advocates of the voluntary system is, that compulsory assessment diminishes private charity. How they arrive at this conclusion I am at a loss to conceive; I have heard the assertion, usque ad nauseam, but I have never heard the grounds upon which it is based. Is it based upon the absence of private charity in England? Is it based upon the boundless private charity in Ireland? Those who make the assertion must surely have forgotten that the largest compulsory assessment in the world is in England, or must have forgotten the endless number of institutions supported by voluntary contributions in this country. Have they never heard of soup kitchens, of distributions of coals, of blankets, &c. &c. &c.? if not, let them read Mr. Chadwick's Report on the Charities in Spitalfields." They must have forgotten, too, that England's charity has not staid at home; they must have forgotten that her charity has reached the suffering Greek, the suffering Pole, and the suffering of every other nation; and that, hardened as the heart of England is by assessment, it has even felt for those whom Ireland, not hardened by assessment, was unable to relieve. Has any one forgotten the great subscription in London, some years since, when more than 100,000l. was subscribed for the starving population on the west coast of Ireland? One-seventh of the whole of the poor's rates of England, viz. of eight millions, is expended in London and its immediate neighbourhood, and yet there is scarcely a principal street in that city, in which there is not a palace dedicated to charity, and supported by voluntary contributions. I only wish that those who talk of compulsory payments destroying private charity, could witness the energetic pleading for the poor, which, as an assistant poor law commissioner, I constantly witness in those rate-payers who have not been disabused of the reports spread, relative to the objects of the new system. When the deserving poor were concerned, I never met with a man willing to curtail their comforts, though I frequently meet with those whose benevolent feelings would lead them, to give charity where it is not required or deserved, and consequently where it will do mischief.”—(Revans, p. 135.)

"The Scotch system is always adduced as an instance of the advantages of the voluntary over the compulsory system. Those who are so loud in their praises of the Scotch system, seem to have forgotten that the advantages are more likely in the mode of administering, than in the mode of raising, the fund. It does not appear to me, however, that any one knows much about the Scotch system; many pretend to the knowledge, but I suspect its worth. I have seen how completely the facts were at variance with the assertions made relative to England and Ireland, previously to the searching inquiries undertaken by the government; but even admitting all that is claimed for the administration in Scotland, and that the administration depends upon the mode of collection, I can only say, that the collection is to all intents and purposes a compulsory collection. The law says, if you do not give sufficient, you shall be assessed. This is much the sort of request which a civil highwayman makes when he lets you see that if civility won't do force will be applied. This voluntary system is the English system, if the English please to adopt it. The law only directs the overseer to raise by assessment whatever is required for the poor, it does not direct him to refuse voluntary contributions. If, therefore, a few foolish people in a parish choose to relieve their neighbours from their fair share of the contribution, they

may indulge their kindly propensities without any risk of interference from the law. Our northern neighbours, who are not the least shrewd people of the three kingdoms, are beginning to discover that their voluntary system is excellent for relieving the uncharitable at the expense of the charitable-a mere illustration of working the willing horse to death; and they are, consequently, very generally adopting assessment."

We have now done with the question for the present. We have, we conceive, gone quite far enough to show that Ireland must have a poor law, and that immediately. It is admitted that "a cry" has been raised in Ireland, which must be satisfied, and on this ground Mr. O'Connell has declared that he will support a measure*. For our parts we take, as will be seen, higher grounds than the mere obedience to "a cry" not approved of. We will never recommend, neither will we in any way support, that which we deem objectionable, and it comes with an ill grace from one who acknowledges such a motive, to denounce the friends of a poor law for Ireland as declaimers and demagogues. If we were called upon to define the word demagogue, we should say it is a term used to designate one who is ever ready to obey a popular "cry," though convinced that it is in favour of a mischievous or useless

measure.

The British public are not much less interested in the question than the Irish, and it will be disgraceful to the government, if another session be permitted to pass without an enactment on the subject. The people of this country have been accused of apathy towards Ireland; let the number of petitions in favour of a poor law for Ireland, show that this accusation is unmerited. The proposals of the commissioners touching emigration, improvements, employment, &c., are so many absurdities, which would only lead to interminable jobbing; in short, no one can give any attention to the state of Ireland, without being convinced that Mr. Revans's admirable book ought to have been "the Report."

* Mr. O'Connell appears, by his recent speeches, to have changed his mind, since the above was in type.

26

ARTICLE II.

Oesterreich im Jahre 1835, und die Zeichen der Zeit in Teutschland. Von Dr. A. J. GROSS-HOFFINGER.

Stuttgart and Leipsig: 1836.

THE author of this little volume had acquired some reputation in Germany, before the appearance of his present publication, as a writer of that school in politics and literature which is commonly known under the title of "La "Jeune Allemagne." His previous publications were distinguished, we understand, for the same tawdry style and inconsistent rhapsodies which, in the more powerful hands of a Heine and a Gutzkow, have done such serious injury to the taste, the morals, and we may add, to the social and political hopes of Germany. Had he, however, remained in the subordinate position which his talents naturally assigned to him in the ranks of those enthusiasts, he would never have attracted our attention; and in adverting to the false and immoral writings of his associates (a task which we propose to attempt at some future time), we should have left him to lag unheeded in the rear of his more dangerous prototypes. But through a series of events, which we are unable fully to explain, Dr. Gross-Hoffinger has earned, by an apostacy more sudden and complete than any upon record even amongst “La Jeune Allemagne," that distinction which a conscientious maintenance of the principles he once avowed would never have conferred upon him. Fate and the consequences of a bad digestion brought him back, after an absence of many years spent in the more liberal countries of Germany, to the land in which he had been born and bred,-to the frontiers of that Austria where the winds of popular discord never blow, and to those salubrious mineral springs of Bohemia, which worked in his case an equal change on the body and the mind of the patient. A residence of eight weeks at Carlsbad, and the potation of no less than 400 tumblers of warm water were required to restore the tone of Dr. Gross-Hoffinger's stomach, to facilitate the secretion of the bile, and to diffuse over his whole frame an enthusiasm for absolute government, and in particular for