over title-deeds which secure the
"quiet enjoyment" of the land to others; and if they imitate the oratory
of their superiors, they will remark upon the strange injustice, that he
should be bound down a slave to musty papers, which give to others those
pastures from which he never reaps a single blade of grass, and which he
is not even permitted to behold. These commissioners would certainly be
tempted to address a report to Parliament full of melancholy
representations, and ending with the recommendation to shake out such
unhappy tenants into the fields. It would be long before they could be
brought to understand that he of the desk and pen would, at the end of
half an hour, find nothing in those fields but a mortal _ennui_. To him
there is no _occupation_ in all those acres; and therefore they would
soon be to him as barren as the desert.

If there is any apparent levity in the last paragraph we have penned, it
is a levity that is far from our heart. There is no subject which gives
us so much concern as this--of the undoubted distress which exists
amongst the labouring population, and the necessity that exists to
alleviate and to combat it. Coming from the immediate perusal of Utopian
schemes, promising a community of goods, and from the reconsideration of
those arguments which prove such schemes to be delusive and mischievous,
the impression that is left on our mind is the profound conviction of
the duty of government, to do whatever lies really in its power for the
amelioration of the condition of the working classes. The present system
of civilized society works, no doubt, for the good of the whole, but
assuredly _they_ do not reap an equal benefit with other classes, and on
them falls the largest share of its inevitable evils. May we not say
that, whatever the social body, acting in its aggregate capacity, _can_
do to redress the balance--whether in education of their children, in
sanatory regulations which concern their workshops and their dwellings,
or in judicious charity that will not press upon the springs of
industry--it is _bound_ to do by the sacred obligation of justice?

FOOTNOTES:

[28] _Etudes sur les Reformateurs, ou Socialistes Modernes._ Par M.
LOUIS REYBAUD.

[29] We shall perhaps take some opportunity to speak separately of M.
Leroux's work, _Sur l'Humanite_. It is a work of very superior
pretension to the writings of MM. St Simon, Fourier, and others, who
must rather be regarded as makers of