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THE FLORIST’S JOURNAL. 
and trying to prevent the city artizan from taking a breathing of 
the country on sabbath days, more parks and gardens were added 
to every town, the moral improvement of the people would be 
far more promoted, for it is scarcely possible to admire nature 
without looking up to nature’s God. It is as little possible for 
the artisan, who works hard during six days of the week, not to 
seek enjoyment on the seventh ; and what is denied him on the 
one hand he will have on the other—if he be not allowed to enter 
into a garden, he will enter into an alehouse. And I leave it to 
the zealous conservators of sabbath-day sanctity to decide whether 
a walk in a garden, or a seat in an alehouse, be most conducive 
to sabbath preservation, and the moral improvement of society. 
I shall leave it to the country proprietors to decide whether 
miserable huts, such as disgrace many a fair estate in Britain, or 
neat cottages, be most ornamental to their estate—most likely to 
attach the working people to their landlords, and most honourable 
to themselves as umpires of the working classes’ comforts and 
happiness. 
In my humble opinion, the first step towards the moral im¬ 
provement of town populations ought to be—to amply provide 
means for rural recreations. And I am convinced, that to make 
the country peasantry intelligent and happy, the only best way 
will be found to be to give them comfortable neat cottages with 
gardens, where practicable ; at all events there ought always to be 
some suitable plants trained up on the fronts and ends of these 
cottages, and a border, thirty or thirty-six inches wide for them 
to grow in, railed in so that children might neither trample the 
ground nor injure the plants. The plants in general ought to be 
exotics, so as to stimulate the cottager to make inquiries about 
the native country of the plant, or if he knew something of it 
already he would be anxious and proud to rear, in this country, 
plants naturally inhabitants of a distant and dissimilar one. 
It would be requisite, of course, to give small prizes to the 
most successful cultivator, (all circumstances duly considered;) 
but instead of pecuniary rewards, I think books would be best— 
these ought not always to be merely religious ones—but such as 
Pinnock’s Catechisms, Joyce's Scientific Dialogues, a volume of 
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, or their Information for the 
People, Dr. Neil's Treatise on British Horticulture, Rhind’s 
History of the Vegetable Kingdom, the forthcoming work on the 
