of a large proportion of workmen. The facts that have again and again been given to the public in illustration of this, are utterly overwhelming. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Edinburgh in 1851, Mr. Porter first gave publicity to a fact that ever since has, in forms innumerable, been exciting the amazement of the world. It is, that the working men of the United Kingdom consume every year upwards of twenty millions' worth of spirits, upwards of twenty-five millions' worth of beer, and upwards of seven millions' worth of tobacco-making, in all, £53,413,165 sterling!

Mr. Clay, of Preston, in analysing carefully the expenditure of 131 workmen employed in one mill, found that their gross earnings were £154, 16s. a week, and that of that sum £34, 15s. was spent in liquors. Excluding twelve, who were teetotallers, it was found that the average yearly expenditure of the rest was £11, 7s. 9d. each, while fifteen spent upwards of 25 per cent. of their earnings on drink, and forty-one more from 25 to 75 per cent. Mr. William Chambers mentions, in his tract on Mis-expenditure, that several years ago, in visiting a large printingoffice in London, he was struck with the amount of beer supplied for the workmen, and ascertained that few of them spent less than a shilling a day on beer,

making an expenditure for each, on that article alone, of £18 a year. In an ironwork at Sunderland, a man was pointed out to him, who at one time earned a guinea a day, or from £300 to £400 a year, but having spent all on drink, he was reduced to a lower department, with a guinea a week in place of a day. In another work, a Frenchman was pointed out to him who earned £5, 10s. a week, but by exercising economy, he was on the way to realize a competency, with which he would probably return soon to his native country.1

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Of all wasteful and improvident workmen, none perhaps can surpass the navvy. A civil engineer, acquainted with railway undertakings, has calculated that navvies usually spend on drink from 7s. to Ss. a week each, and that on an average, for every mile of railway, upwards of £1000 has been squandered in liquor. If the railways of the United Kingdom extend to 10,000 miles, this would give the vast sum of ten millions as thrown away on drink in their construction. We say deliberately, thrown away (and if thrown away, it is worse than

1 French and German workmen have frequently more economy and forethought than British. The author of Workmen and their Difficulties mentions a remarkable instance of this. A French workman, in the employment of Chance Brothers, Birmingham, receiving the unusually high wages of £10 a week, was found on leaving to have accumulated in the hands of his master no less a sum than £5000, while no Englishman at the time had more than £50.-(P. 150.)

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thrown away), because, if medical testimony and wide experience be worth anything, it is certain that the habitual use of strong drink and tobacco, by men in good health, and in the full enjoyment of their physical powers, is not only not a benefit, but an injury.

If working men, between the age of eighteen and thirty, would only practise a careful economy, more would be done by far than can be done by any other social arrangement for elevating their condition and enlarging their comfort. Observe, we do not say by any other means whatever, but by any other social arrangement.

Young men have often been termed the hope of their country, and the hope of the Church. In a moral and religious point of view, the crisis of a young man's life usually arrives before the age of twenty. What one is to be during the whole of life depends mainly, in nine cases out of ten, on what one is before twenty. This consideration gives a solemn and overwhelming interest to a period of life where the temptations to carelessness are very Too often, young men do not realize the necessity of being in earnest at all till they have passed that period. But to pass that period is to lose a tide the like of which never returns; none are more sensible of this than those who have let

numerous.

youth slip past before they began to be earnest; in after years, when they did turn over a new leaf, such persons have never ceased to regret the advantages which they lost, and the evils which they suffered.

It is but another application of the same great truth, to affirm that the elevation of the great body of working men depends more upon the way in which workmen from eighteen to thirty dispose of their earnings, and conduct themselves generally, than upon any other economical consideration. That class of workmen, we firmly believe, hold in their hands the destiny of their body as a whole. We wish, at the outset, to make this statement as emphatic as possible. You may judge afterwards whether we make out the proof of it or not. Young men at that age are often prevented by modesty from appreciating the influence they may exert, and the good they may do.

But to proceed. The period of life which we have named is that during which it is least difficult for the working man to save something from his earnings. In most cases, the young journeyman earns as much as other workmen; but his necessary expenditure is much more limited. Until he is married, he has commonly but himself to maintain; and for a few years after marriage, his children are

young, and cost comparatively little. If he live then as he must live some years after, it is surely no extravagant supposition that, wages being good and steady, he may lay past a sum of 3s. a week. This sum, at the end of the period in question, if judiciously invested, would amount to considerably upwards of £100; and if every working man, or nearly every working man in the kingdom, were owner of such a sum, and were moreover a man of such character and habits as the possession of it in these circumstances would imply, it is not difficult to see that something like a revolution in the social condition of the working classes would be realized.

For in truth, there is nothing of a worldly kind that so holds down the working classes as their being from hand to mouth--and nothing that would so better their condition in a hundred ways as the possession of a little capital. At present, if a working man sees a favourable opening to commence business on his own account, where a little capital is needed, he is merely tantalized by the thought how entirely beyond his power is the situation which would have suited him so well.

If a difference with he, and it may be

his employer throws him idle, thousands more, are cast on the precarious supplies of the trade-union,-a supply not sufficient to keep the best of his property from the pawnshop, or to