whose noble Healing Art in his charitable hands
becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these things for us:
these things are not of this year, or of last year, have no
reference to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only
to the common state. Not in sharp fever-fits, but in chronic
gangrene of this kind is Scotland suffering. A Poor-law, any and
every Poor-law, it may be observed, is but a temporary measure;
an anodyne, not a remedy: Rich and Poor, when once the naked
facts of their condition have come into collision, cannot long
subsist together on a mere Poor-law. True enough:--and yet,
human beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too, till something
better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a
byword among the nations. O, what a waste is there; of noble
and thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms;
valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,--which all the
metal of Potosi cannot purchase back; to which the metal of
Potosi, and all you can buy with _it,_ is dross and dust!

Why dwell on this aspect of the matter? It is too indisputable,
not doubtful now to any one. Descend where you will into the
lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by
Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by
Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking,
the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit
that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is
fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered,
there was literally never any parallel. At Stockport Assizes,--
and this too has no reference to the present state of trade,
being of date prior to that,--a Mother and a Father are arraigned
and found guilty of poisoning three of their children, to defraud
a 'burial-society' of some _31.8s._ due on the death of each
child: they are arraigned, found guilty; and the official
authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not
solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that
department of things. This is in the autumn of 1841; the crime
itself is of the previous year or season. "Brutal savages,
degraded Irish," mutters the idle reader of Newspapers; hardly
lingering on this incident. Yet it is an incident worth
lingering on; the depravity, savagery and degraded Irishism
being never so well admitted. In the British land, a human
Mother and F