interminable brutalisation; bodily organs, which, for their developement, would require the open air and the genial influence of the sunbeams, are condemned to miserable weakness and deformity.

To require the legislature to put a stop to this hideous grinding of the poor man by the rich; to petition for enactments to oppose the demoralisation which is the ordinary result of bringing together large numbers of young workers; to endeavour to introduce and to multiply certain machines in cottages, that, in the course of the seasons, the labours of agriculture may be united to mechanical toils, is to do an action at once patriotic and humane, to shew a true acquaintance with the real wants of the working classes. But obstinately to persist in effecting by the hand of man, with great difficulty and at great expense, labours which machinery performs instantaneously and at a cheap rate; to make working men resemble brutes,-to require of them daily exertions which ruin their health, and which science can achieve a hundredfold more readily by the aid of wind, or water, or steam, this were to go directly contrary to the object desired to be attained; this were to devote the poor to nakedness; to reserve for the rich, exclusively, innumerable blessings which at present are shared by all; this were, finally, to return from comfort and cheerfulness to the ages of ignorance, of barbarism, and of misery.

It is time to quit this subject, though I am far from having exhausted it. I may not, indeed, have triumphed over a phalanx of inveterate systematic prejudices, but I may, at least, hope that my plead

ing will gain the concurrence of those thousands and thousands of idlers in the metropolis, whose life is spent in reconciling their taste for pleasure with the care which their ill health demands. In a few years, thanks to the discoveries of Watt, all these Sybarites, rapidly conveyed by steam on railways, may, in short space, visit all parts of the kingdom. In a single day they may go and see our naval force fitting out at Toulon; breakfast at Marseilles on the juicy mullets of the Mediterranean; plunge, at noon, their enervated limbs in the mineral waters of Bagnères; and return, in the evening, by Bordeaux, in time for the ballet at the opera! Is this denied? Then I say, that the trip I have sketched out requires only a pace of twentysix leagues an hour; that various trials of steam carriages have already realised a velocity of fifteen leagues; and, lastly, that Mr. Stephenson, the celebrated Newcastle engineer, offers to construct engines which shall go twice and a half as fast,engines which shall go forty leagues within the hour!

THE END.

EDINBURGH: PRINTED BY T. CONSTABLE,

PRINTER TO HER MAJESTY.