rning then to this abstract, we find one minister
in Edinburgh saying,

"I visited a part of my parish on Friday last, and in all the houses
I found persons destitute of food, and completely destitute of fuel;
without an article of furniture; without beds or bedding, the inmates
lying on straw."

Another tells the Commissioners,

"the allowance generally made, is not sufficient to keep them (the
outdoor pensioners) in existence at the lowest possible rate of
living."

A third says

"I have often trembled when I have gone at the call of duty to visit
the receptacles of wretchedness, because I felt that I could not
relieve the misery which I must look upon; and in such cases, nothing
but a sense of duty could compel me to go and visit the poor."

And a fourth minister mentions that his poor parishioners had stated to
him

"that they regarded themselves as outcasts from the sympathy of their
fellow-men."

It also appears from Dr. Alison's evidence that this distress is
increasing. You read of Glasgow, always fruitful in extreme instances of
misery, that in one of the private poor-houses, 22 children were found,
all afflicted with fever, and occupying a room _about fourteen feet
square_. The Superintendent of the Glasgow Police, speaking of a
district in the centre of the town, says

"These places are filled by a population of many thousands of
miserable creatures. The houses in which they live are altogether
unfit for human beings, and every apartment is filled with a
promiscuous crowd of men, women and children, in a state of filth and
misery. In many of the houses there is scarcely any ventilation.
Dunghills lie in the vicinity of the dwellings, and from the
extremely defective sewerage, filth of every kind constantly
accumulates."

Touching the immediate object of the enquiry, the relief of paupers, we
find that Humanity having gone with cold and cautious steps (giving 4_s._
a month, sometimes, to fathers and mothers of families) through the
Southern and middle regions of Scotland, becomes in the Highlands nearly
petrified: at "the utmost" is only able to divide amongst "the impotent
poor about 3_s._ 6_d._ a-head for the whole year." I dare say many
things may be urged against this, as against all other evidence--a bit
picked off here, another pruned off there--this statement modified, that
a little explained. Do what