It is, therefore, an additional testimony to the goodness of the Deity, that where the scheme which his wisdom devised for the furtherance of his plans in exercising and improving the faculties of mankind, might interfere with individual happiness, he has contrived such mitigations of the inconvenience, as not only to diminish its force, but almost to render its existence questionable.

CHAPTER V.

On the Capabilities of Improvement in the State of advanced Civilization.

Ir may be plausibly argued, that speculations on the nature of happiness, however satisfactory in the closet, are often decisively contradicted by the realities of life; and that the appearance of our own society, which meets every eye, is a standing argument against my conclusions. It furnishes us with an example of great public prosperity; of all the mechanical improvements and refinements of art, which the combination of skill and capital, and an industrious population, can produce: yet what is the result? Indigence and pauperism; and in the very heart of opulence, and industry, and intelligence, considerably more than a

tenth part of the population relieved by public charity.*

It is very soothing to our indolence and selfsatisfaction, to charge upon the constitution of the world, that is, upon the ordinances of the Deity, the various evils of poverty and ignorance which confront us on every side. But it

I have stated the fact much as it appears on the face of the returns. But it is liable to great misapprehension with those who do not remember, that by the system of poor laws, inadequate wages are made up to labourers with large families by the parish; they derive, therefore, no more than a fourth, fifth, or sixth part of their support from this source: and that in most cases only in severe seasons, dear years, or during temporary loss of work. This circumstance requires the more observation, because it appears on the face of one of Mr. Colquhoun's abstracts, that among the unproductive labourers in Great Britain and Ireland, whose exertions do not create any new property, are to be classed 1,548,400 paupers. Now, a large proportion of those here denominated paupers and unproductive, are in fact the most hard-working members of the community. Those relieved in work-houses may be reckoned really as unproductive, and amounted, in 1803, to 83,462. Mr. Colquhoun himself, in a subsequent calculation, considers the paupers as gaining two fifths of their support. Compare pages 109 and 154.

would be more reasonable as well as more decorous, to inquire in the first place, how far such evils arise necessarily from the law of nature, and how far, on the other hand, they admit of easy mitigation, and only need that care and attention which the Christian religion enjoins every man to bestow upon his neighbour. When a South American Indian is seized with an infectious disorder, he is shut up in a solitary hovel, and abandoned to his fate. In our improved state of society, the sufferer under a similar calamity experiences the benefit of skill and care, and is probably recovered. But we must not be Europeans in our treatment of bodily maladies, and treat the minds and morals of our fellow creatures with barbarian indifference. The Author of our existence, when he did not exempt us from the civil or physical disorders of an imperfect state, ordained also that each should have their alleviations ; without which mankind would live miserably or perish prematurely. Those alleviations, indeed, are not definitely pointed out or prescribed. Neither was it possible they

should be; inasmuch as they depend on circumstances varying at every point of civilization, varying in every climate and country, and even in the same country according to its progress towards opulence. The human race, whose faculties are infinitely improved by a state of advanced civilization, is bound to employ them in discovering and applying the remedies of those evils which peculiarly belong to each condition of society. It is a part of the system by which the Deity acts universally, to render man a free and spontaneous, but not a necessary instrument of his own welfare.

-Pater ipse colendi

Haud facilem esse viam voluit, primusque per artem
Movit agros, curis acuens mortalia corda :

Nec torgere gravi passus sua regna veterno.

This is as true of the moral as of the natural world. Neither soil can dispense with cultivation, although both are so constituted as to be capable of excellent produce. Let that only be undertaken, which in our advanced stage of civilization is within the reach of practicable accomplishment, and the general state of so