the maternal home,
what provocation must they have had from the parent?

'In the year ending Lady-day 1859,' said the London _Times_ of February
15th, 1860, 'England and Wales spent five million seven hundred and
ninety-two thousand nine hundred and sixty-three pounds in the relief of
the poor. It is estimated that on July 1st, 1859, nine hundred and
ninety-seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-six paupers were
receiving relief in or out of the workhouse in this part of the empire.
This is near a million of persons, at an average cost of about five
pounds sixteen shillings a head, a considerable improvement on the
previous year. The computation is, that every sixteenth person, or one
person in every three households, is a pauper, hanging like a dead
weight on the industry of the other fifteen. This, too, is only one form
of charity, beside untold millions spent in endowed alms-houses,
hospitals, asylums for every imaginable infirmity, coal-funds,
clothing-funds, charity-schools, voluntary labor-rates,
church-collections, alms done in secret, and several hundred other
species of benevolence.'

Vainly does an American strive to realize such a state of society. Its
effects are visible in the hatred of the poor toward the rich, which, if
things continue as they are, will ultimately produce a war of classes.
The work-houses and other alms-houses are always filled. There may be
brief intervals when trade is brisk, and statesmen brag of the
prosperity of the country, but these are only as the sane moments of a
delirious patient. The general health of the community must not be
judged from these. When in a year that it confesses is a favorable one,
the leading political journal admits the proportion of paupers
subsisting on alms to be one to fifteen, what must be the proportion in
periods of great mercantile depression, which recur more frequently as
time advances? I can not at all agree with Mr. Emerson, that England has
not within her the elements of decay. She has. Her maritime supremacy is
gone; her commercial advantages have vanished. In the world's market she
possesses a stall, and nothing more. If it is better supplied than the
stalls of some nations in the same market, it is, in its turn, inferior
to those of others. I can not say, with her enemies, Let her decay. But
I do bid her look to it in time, for her present condition is not one of
promise.

A MILITARY NATION.

The Confederates are vastly our super