CAUSES OF DISTRESS REMEDIAL AGENCIES. 547 



trious, and a moral order of men, to depravity, discontent, poverty, 

 and pauperism. And is this state of things to continue ? Are we 

 to see our country robbed annually of thousands of her most 

 valuable citizens ? Are other states to profit by our blindness ? 

 and are other independent kingdoms besides the United States 

 to be based on the social virtues and industrial energies of our ex- 

 patriated population ? Is the chimera that because we are wealthy, 

 and becoming still more wealthy we are as a matter of course a 

 more powerful and a more stable kingdom, to blind us to the inevi- 

 table consequences of the era of mechanism ? Are the millions de- 

 pendent upon labour to be ground down and ultimately driven from 

 the field of profitable employment ? and are all these things to take 

 place without one effort to save ourselves? Are we to trust blindly 

 to the course of events ? and are our national councils to be arenas 

 solely for party strife, without a single thought being bestowed upon 

 the condition of the many ? Is the giving of the elective franchise 

 to stand in the place of wise domestic policy ? Is the outcry for 

 political privileges an evidence merely of the heavy pressure of 

 circumstances upon the middle and lower classes ? We would hope 

 not, for we love our country and her institutions ; and we would not 

 see one of her sons desert her. But how is this state of things to be 

 remedied ? Mechanism will proceed in its onward career ; labour 

 will be pushed from Manufactures : and this being the case, what is 

 to become of the redundancy of labourers over the demand of the 

 labour-market ? Are our large farms to be parcelled out into allot- 

 ments ? or are we to shut up our peasantry in workhouses, there to 

 compete for a pittance just sufficient to keep them alive with me- 

 chanism out of doors ? Certainly not : we hate the word poor-house 

 or workhouse, except when used in its original and legitimate mean- 

 ing ; namely, as an asylum for age, impotence, and decrepitude. 

 To place a man in a workhouse, and separate him from his family, 

 ruins him for ever as a moral and domestic agent ; it is a slavery of 

 the most hateful character. Well did that enlightened man and 

 generous philanthropist, Sir Thomas Bernard, speak of workhouses; 

 and he was qualified above almost all other men to give a correct 

 opinion as to their merits. " The cottager, if once settled in the 

 workhouse, feels a privation of all motives to industry and activity. 

 Independence, domestic habits, the love of home, the power of being 



