earnestly desired by Sismondi and Chalmers, and which they, if they had lived to see it, would have been the foremost to recognise and welcome.

The results here presented to the reader have been very slowly arrived at; but the composition is hasty, having been effected during the only period of strength sufficient for such a purpose that has occurred in the course of several years of depressing ill-health. From this cause many references which would have been desirable are omitted, and others made from memory may be inaccurate; but I trust there is no inaccuracy which materially affects the reasoning.

The Second Part of the following work contains a series of practical suggestions, some directly growing out of the principles established in the First Part, others having an indirect but still close connection with that view of our industrial condition which the First Part exhibits. In this and in the Third Part, which is little more than an introduction to that which was at first intended to be the substance of the work, but which it has been found impossible to execute at present, there are various criticisms on public questions, religious as well as political, and on public men, the tone of which may appear presumptuous. I shall be sorry if they produce this impression, which I think would be an unjust one, but cannot help it. The whole has been written with the conviction that nothing is more wanted at the present time than downright statements of what men actually think; and whoever resolves to write or speak thus is very likely to

assume an air of dogmatism, more or less at variance with the received ideas of good taste. A reader, however, who is satisfied that this proceeds only from frankness, and that it may be accompanied with full consciousness of liability to error, will not think the offence too serious to be forgiven.

As this last revise sheet goes to the printer, the announcement is made of the deplorable result of the Liverpool election. Just two years after the death of Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Cardwell, a statesman of the highest qualifications, representing his policy, is deprived of his seat for the second commercial city in the empire, only because he is too honest to defer to a popular preju- am lucru, i dice. About the same time, and for the same reason, Mr. Roundell Palmer retires from Plymouth. I have never had any connection with the party to which those gentlemen belong, and know nothing of them except what the public knows from their speeches and their acts; but it certainly does appear to me, that England might be searched without finding two men better qualified to sit in the House of Commons, and that that state of public opinion which excludes them at a time like the present, is a far more serious matter than any question as to the individuals who should fill the Government offices.

If it were possible to believe that the opposition to Mr. Gladstone in the University of Oxford could succeed, it would throw a still darker gloom over the

political horizon; but even the existence of that opposition, in defiance of the excellent custom of the University, is a sign of evil omen, because, so far as it goes, it exhibits the overbearing tyranny of democratic passions, in the very class amongst whom they should be most restrained. The admixture of religious excitement does not diminish, but, on the contrary, aggravates the danger of this unqualified working of the democratic principle; and if the rectors and curates who are now about to travel from so many parts of England, in order to punish their representative for not being a delegate, shall accomplish that object, they may find hereafter, when the system which they are sanctioning has gradually driven from public life every man combining nice personal honour with real political capacity, and has entrusted all power to honest dulness and unscrupulous ability, that they have been accelerating the approach of a time, when the votes and wishes of clergymen will have as little weight in England as amongst the millions of the English race in North America, who, in politics, exact from the ministers of religion nearly the same passive submission that is expected from women and from negroes.

London, July 8, 1852.

PART I.

DANGERS.

"Take heed and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the

abundance of the things which he possesseth."

LUKE xii. 15.