ng of the child's strength has
not hitherto been an element in your calculation, and it shall not
become one.

All these various schemes--socialist or otherwise--of legislative
interference, take their rise from the aspect, sufficiently deplorable,
of the distress of the manufacturing population; and it is almost
excusable if the contemplation of such distress should throw men a
little off their balance. But it is not so easily excusable if men, once
launched on their favourite projects, endeavour to prove their necessity
by heightened descriptions of that distress, and by unauthorized
prophecies of its future and continual increase. What a formidable array
of figures--figures of speech as well as of arithmetic--are brought down
upon us with gloomy perseverance, to convince us that the manufacturing
population of this country is on the verge of irreparable ruin! We think
it right to put our readers upon their guard against these over-coloured
descriptions. Even when Parliamentary reports are quoted, whose
authority is not to be gainsaid, they ought to defend themselves against
the _first_ impression which these are calculated to make. The facts
stated may be true, but there are _other facts_ which are not stated
equally true, and which the scope and purpose of such reports did not
render it necessary to collect. If, in this country, there is much
distress, if in some places there is that utter prostration of mind and
body which extreme poverty occasions, there is also much prosperity;
there is also, in other places, much vigorous industry, receiving its
usual, and more than its usual recompense. If there are plague-spots in
our population, there are also large tracts of it still sound and
healthy. Set any one down to read list after list of all the maimed and
halt and sick in our great metropolis, and the whole town will seem to
him, for the time being, one wide hospital: he must throw open the
window and look on the busy, animated, buoyant crowd that is rushing
through the streets, before he shakes off the impression that he is
living in a city of the plague.

Without a doubt, he who approaches the consideration of the distress of
the labouring classes, should have a tender and sympathizing spirit; how
else can the subject possess for him its true and profound interest? But
it is equally necessary that he bring to it a cultivated and
well-disciplined compassion; that he should know where, in the name of
others, he sh