nigh
impossible. The laws of social life rise up like insurmountable barriers
between him and escape. As he turns towards the society whose rights he
has outraged, its frown settles upon him; the penalties of the laws he
has violated await him; and he falls back despairing, and suffers the
fetters of the evil habit to whose power he has yielded himself to be
fastened closer and heavier upon him. O for some good angel, in the form
of a brother-man and touched with a feeling of his sins and infirmities,
to reassure his better nature and to point out a way of escape from its
body of death!

We have been led into these remarks by an account, given in the London
Weekly Chronicle, of a most remarkable interview between the professional
thieves of London and Lord Ashley,--a gentleman whose best patent of
nobility is to be found in his generous and untiring devotion to the
interests of his fellow-men. It appears that a philanthropic gentleman
in London had been applied to by two young thieves, who had relinquished
their evil practices and were obtaining a precarious but honest
livelihood by picking up bones and rags in the streets, their loss of
character closing against them all other employments. He had just been
reading an address of Lord Ashley's in favor of colonial emigration, and
he was led to ask one of the young men how he would like to emigrate.

"I should jump at the chance!" was the reply. Not long after the
gentleman was sent for to visit one of those obscure and ruinous courts
of the great metropolis where crime and poverty lie down together,--
localities which Dickens has pictured with such painful distinctness.
Here, to his surprise, he met a number of thieves and outlaws, who
declared themselves extremely anxious to know whether any hope could be
held out to them of obtaining an honest living, however humble, in the
colonies, as their only reason for continuing in their criminal course
was the impossibility of extricating themselves. He gave them such
advice and encouragement as he was able, and invited them to assemble
again, with such of their companions as they could persuade to do so, at
the room of the Irish Free School, for the purpose of meeting Lord
Ashley. On the 27th of the seventh month last the meeting took place.
At the hour appointed, Lord Ashley and five or six other benevolent
gentlemen, interested in emigration as a means of relief and reformation
to the criminal poor, entered the room,