mass of idleness, fraud, theft, falsehood, and profligacy throughout all the classes of our labouring population. The crying iniquity and evil of this system are compelling the British parliament to abolish it altogether in that country. Our state-legislatures never assemble without augmenting the number of lotteries. Our favourite scheme of substituting a state prison for the gallows is a most prolific mother of crime. During the severity of the winter season, its lodgings and accommodations are better than those of many of our paupers, who are thereby incited to crime in order to mend their condition. And the pernicious custom of pardoning the most atrocious criminals, after a short residence in the state-prison, is continually augmenting our flying squadrons of murderers, house-breakers, foot-pads, forgers, highway robbers, and swindlers of all sorts. The effect of Mr. Bentham's plan of a penitentiary, with its panorama and whispering gallery, is not known, because it has never been tried in this country; but, beyond all peradventure, our state-prisons, as at present constituted, are grand demoralizers of our people.

Our state insolvent laws, likewise (for we are too patriotic to permit Congress to pass an uniform bankrupt law, that might compel our merchants to pay their foreign creditors), acts as a perpetual bounty for dishonesty and fraud. A few favoured creditors, by whose false representations the debtor has obtained large credits, are secured, and the rest of the creditors, more especially if they happen to be British, are sure to get nothing. The insolvent is discharged, as a matter of course, from all responsibility, and left at liberty to renew his depredations upon the property of others according to his own inclination, experience, and dexterity.

The poor-law system, as an awful encouragement to pauperism and profligacy, requires no further comment. With the exception of forgery, in the ingenuity and audacity of which our native Americans far surpass all other people, and for which our state-prisons do not afford even a palliative, much less a remedy, the foreigners and free blacks are the most numerous and atrocious of

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our criminals. The "low Irish," as they are called, who come out to us in shoals from their own country, and are by far the most noxious donation which the United States receive from Britain, fill up our lowest departments of labour in the manufactories, or the manual operations of our large cities, as hod-men, porters, and so forth, are in general, rude, intemperate, and abandoned. They tenant our bridewells and state-prisons in great numbers. The next in the scale of profligacy, as criminals, are the freed negroes; then come foreigners, other than Irish; and lastly, our own native citizens, of which few find their way into confinement for crime, excepting, as before stated, for forgery; of adepts in which the United States produce a greater number, in proportion to their population, than any country in Europe; their numbers, however, might be materially diminished, if our legislators could be persuaded to try the experiment of the gallows upon them.

The prevailing vice throughout the Union, excepting not New-England, is immoderate drinking; encouraged doubtless by the relaxing heats of the climate, in the southern, middle, and western states, by the high wages of labour, and by the absence of all restriction, in the shape of excise, or internal duty. Not only our labourers generally, but too many of our farmers, merchants, and other classes of the community, are prone to a pernicious indulgence in spirituous liquors.

The alarming increase of pauperism, drunkenness, and general profligacy, in the city of New-York, has induced our most respectable citizens of all classes to appoint a committee to examine into the causes, and devise the means of checking this great national evil, which menaces the very existence of our social fabric. This committee is now in session; and every succeeding day presents them with an accumulating mass of facts, all conspiring to show forth the loathsome deformity of our city, with respect to its rapidly augmenting poverty and vice. In the year 1817, our corporation expended one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in the poor law

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which sum is in addition to other public charities, as the hospital, asylum for orphans, widow's society, charity schools, &c. and in addition to the private charities, which in this city are numerous and expensive. Indeed, the Americans, generally, are a charitable benevolent people, both in private and in public. The city of New-York has very recently, raised five thousand dollars for the sufferers by the late fire at St. John's in Newfoundland. And Boston, with only one-third of the New-York population, subscribed ten thousand dollars for the same object. But Boston has always been peculiarly munificent; witness a few years since, when some of our principal citizens subscribed twelve thousand dollars for the support of the widow and children of the British Consul for that district, whe had died in indigent circumstances.

In consequence of the extreme suffering of the poor in the city of New-York, during the winter of 1816-17, in January, 1817, a large meeting of the citizens was convened for the purpose of devising some means of immediate relief for their brethren in affliction. Committees were appointed, in each ward of the city, to raise money by subscription, and administer to the more pressing wants of the dependent classes of the community. Six thousand dollars were instantly raised, and entirely consumed in the course of a few days; so prodi gious was the number of distressed applicants for food, fuel, and clothing. Indeed, the number of indigent poor, destitute of all the first necessaries of life, as covering, provisions, fuel, lodging, upon careful examination, was found to far exceed that of any former period of distress. The several committees faithfully discharged their important but painful duties; they visited the habitation of every family that applied for relief. It was not possible for any city in Europe for London, for Paris, for Dublin itself-even at that awful hour of universal distress and visitation, to exhibit a greater proportional number of wretched objects, sunk to the lowest -pitch of barren sorrow and destitution, than were ex

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posed to the astonished view of the various committees, in their rounds of inquiry through the city of NewYork.

Full fifteen thousand men, women and children, during that season, received aid from the hand of public and private charity; that is to say, about one-seventh of the whole population of our city. It raised a cry of alarm and horror throughout all the corners of their extended empire, when, in the year 1816, it was discovered that one-ninth of the population of the British isles was reduced to a state of pauperage and dependence on the bounty of others. Ought such to be the condition of the mass of the people in any part of the United States; where a comparatively small population is spread over an immense territory, blessed with a fertile soil and genial clime; where the burden of government expenditure is scarcely felt; where the national debt is trifling, and the taxes nothing; where there are no tithes; and where the demand for agricultural labour is constantly outrunning its supply?

It is a lamentable and alarming fact, that the number of destitute poor in the city of New-York has averaged an annual augmentation far exceeding the rate of its actual increase of population for several years past; more especially since the winter when the battery, at the confluence of the North and East rivers, was broken up, and distributed for firewood amongst the indigent; and the corporation proclaimed that it would give food and fuel, at the Almshouse, to all distressed applicants, This is the very essence of the impracticable folly, and positive evil of the poor-law system, which promises work and support to all that want; as if it were possible for any human scheme to create either food or employment where neither is to be found in existence.

It is not, however, to be dissembled, that a large proportion of our New-York paupers are foreigners, chiefly from Europe, and some from the neighbouring states and towns. Nor can it be concealed, that the leprosy of wickedness and crime has tainted the lower class of our citizens in a most awful degree; as was to be ex

pected, in consequence of their progressively increasing pauperism. It will scarcely be credited in Europe, that a large proportion of these profligate paupers are free and independent voters at our elections, for charterofficers, for State Representatives, and for Congressmen!

The several committees laboured to investigate the causes which have produced the present wretched and degraded condition of the poor in our city. Some of the distress, undoubtedly, is to be attributed to the vast influx of indigent, and not immaculate, foreigners; to the present depressed condition of commerce and manufactures; to the prodigious number of benevolent societies, which have, with the best and most charitable intentions, undesignedly offered a standing bounty for the continual increase of needy applicants; and to some other causes not proper, perhaps, now to be enumerated, but which our legislators and city magistrates can easily remove if they will; and, perhaps, to the natural tendency of human society to deteriorate, if not constantly watched and guarded by religious and moral culture. A greater portion of the distress, probably, is occasioned by our system of poor-laws, which we have borrowed from England. The British Review for November, 1817, contains an elaborate, masterly, and temperate exposition of the evils which that system has burned, in characters of the nether fire, into the heart and vitals, the body, soul, and spirit of the English population.

But beyond all controversy, the most fertile source of the present unparalleled distress among the poor of the city of New-York, is the general, not to say universal, use of spirituous liquors by the lower orders of the community, of each sex and every age. There are nearly three thousand houses licensed to sell poison to the poor, in the shape of alcohol; in addition to which there are great numbers of cellars and vaults, where ardent spirits are vended without license. And do we wonder at the rapid augmentation of mendicity and crime in this city, when there are so many charnel houses of industry,