the head for long periods, close application to minute objects, as in watchmakers, engravers, tambourworkers, and dressmakers; poisonous substances acting through the skin, as lead, printers' type, and mercury; or on the eyes, or ears, as scarlet-colour, lime-dust, and the noise of machinery.

Before the whole of Mr. Thackray's conclusions can be safely adopted as rules of life, it may perhaps be desirable he should test some of them by a more lengthened experience and wider field of observation. With the exception of this gentleman and Mr. Kay, of Manchester, hardly any medical person has applied himself to the investigation of a subject so important to humanity. One satisfactory result may, I think, be safely deduced from the inquiries of Mr. Thackray; namely, that there is hardly any employment which is not compatible with the enjoyment of tolerable health, when exercised subject to the three following conditions: 1. Moderate hours of labour, according to the greater or less exhausting nature of the employment. 2. Temperate, wholesome, and regular living. 3. Reasonable meal-times, and holidays occasionally, for purer air and exercise. For sake of the last, I hope Mr. Slaney will persevere in his object of obtaining for the people, by legislative provision, public grounds for recreation, botanical gardens, and libraries.

Next to keeping up the price of labour and the preservation of health, a cardinal point with the working classes is to establish and maintain a high standard of comfort and enjoyment in their habita

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tions, clothing, and food; to eschew whatever brings them to the verge of existence, to their last resources in diet, dress, and lodging and as casualties of health and fluctuations in employment are inseparable from every occupation, a provision should always be made, if possible, for periods of slackness, sickness, old age, and infirmity.

It is a disadvantage to the industrious orders that they cannot more easily adjust the supply of labour to the demand. When wages are depressed by competition for work, they are compelled to submit to coarser and scantier fare; and the danger is, that a mode of life at first repugnant to their feelings, and forced on them by necessity, may become habitual. Should this be the case, it is not likely they will make an effort to check the over-supply of labour which has caused their degradation; and as a lower rate of wages is found sufficient for their maintenance, an evil that might have been temporary is made permanent. This appears to be the condition of the Irish; their wages are under sixpence a day, which their masters, doubtless, think enough for men content to live in mud-cabins and feed on potatoes.*

The potato diet of the Irish is a principal reason that

*Not only wages, but gifts are often proportioned to a man's style of living. When James I. heard that Ben Jonson was living in great poverty in an obscure place in London, he sent him 10l. to relieve his necessities. Some of the courtiers remarking on the smallness of the dole, the king said it was enough for "a man who lived in an alley."

famines are so frequent and dreadful among them. The national subsistence depends on a single root, and if the crop of that fails, there is no other substitute to which they can resort. A wheat-fed population may, in the event of scarcity, obtain supplies of corn from other countries; but a potato-fed population, with wages to correspond, could not purchase the aid of foreigners, and if potatoes could be obtained, they are too bulky a commodity to be imported on an emergency. How different the state of a people, when bread and meat, and beer form the chief food of the labourer. Here, there is scope for retrench→ ment in a period of scarcity. From wheat, the working man may temporarily resort to cheaper food-to barley, oats, rice, and vegetables. He has room to fall; but he who is habitually kept on the cheapest food, is without a substitute, when deprived of it. Labourers so placed, are absolutely cut off from every resource. You may take from an Englishman, but you cannot take from an Irishman-no more than from a man already naked. The latter is already in the lowest deep, and he can sink no lower: his wages being regulated by potatoes, the staple article of his subsistence, will not buy him wheat, or barley, or oats; and whenever, therefore, the supply of potatoes fails, he has no escape from absolute famineunless he help himself (as is said to have been the case in the dearth of 1821) to nettles, sea-weed, and sour sorrel, the last of which was found in the stomach of one poor creature, who perished of hunger!

I conclude then, that the great, the all-important

principle bearing on the condition of the industrious classes, is keeping population in the rear of the funds for its employment. If the market of labour be overstocked, wages will be lowered by competition for work, and an inferior standard of comfort and enjoyment forced upon them: and, should habit reconcile them to an inferior style of living, a long farewell may be bid to their future improvement.

Labour, like gold and silver, can be made valuable by its scarcity only, and no other contrivance. All the acts of legislation, all the combinations and devices among workmen themselves, must fail in raising to a high price, that which is redundant, which every where abounds, and which may be indefinitely, and by any one, produced: we might as well seek to give a value to water, or the atmosphere that surrounds us. A scarcity of the employed, and abundance of employers; a population that follows, and not precedes, the augmentation of national wealth, is the great secret of popular amelioration Without this, the advantages of increasing opulence, civilization, and commerce, can never be participated in by the working classes; social improves ments, in every shape, may advance over the land, but it will never touch the low and stagnant pool in which they are immersed.

As the high price of labour produced by scarcity of workmen, is the fortress that protects all their comforts and conveniences, they ought never to yield an inch of the vantage ground,' without dire necessity. The remarks of Mr. M'Culloch on this

point, are dictated by sense and humanity, and well worthy of attention. "The example," says he, "of such individuals, or bodies of individuals, as submit quietly to have their wages reduced, and who are content if they get only the mere necessaries of life, ought never to be held up for public imitation. On the contrary, every thing should be done to make such apathy esteemed disgraceful. The best interests of society require, that the rate of wages should be elevated as high as possible-that a taste for the comforts, luxuries, and enjoyments of human life, should be widely diffused, and, if possible, interwoven with national habits and prejudices. Very low wages, by rendering it impossible for any increased exertions to obtain any considerable increase of comforts and enjoyments, effectually hinders them from being made, and is, of all others, the most powerful cause of that idleness and apathy, that contents itself with what can barely continue animal existence."-Principles of Political Economy, second edition, p. 394.

The father of economical science had inculcated the same philanthropic doctrine. "Is this improvement," asks Smith," in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage, or as an inconveniency to society? The answer seems at first abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole.