uit, etc., and all that tends to acidity.
These are awkward warnings; but _sat est vixisse_. To have
lived respected and regarded by some of the best men in our
age is enough for an individual like me; the rest must be as
God wills, and when He wills.

The poor-laws, into which you have ventured for the love of
the country, form a sad quagmire. They are like John
Bunyan's Slough of Despond, into which, as he observes,
millions of cart-loads of good resolutions have been thrown,
without perceptibly mending the way. From what you say, and
from what I have heard from others, there is a very natural
desire to trust to one or two empirical remedies, such as
general systems of education, and so forth. But a man with a
broken constitution might as well put faith in Spilsbury or
Godbold. It is not the knowledge, but the use which is made
of it, that is productive of real benefit. To say that the
Scottish peasant is less likely than the Englishman to
become an incumbrance on his parish, is saying, in other
words, that this country is less populous,--that there are
fewer villages and towns,--that the agricultural classes,
from the landed proprietor down to the cottager, are
individually more knit and cemented together;--above all,
that the Scotch peasant has harder habits of life, and can
endure from his infancy a worse fare and lodging than your
parish almshouses offer.--There is a terrible evil in
England to which we are strangers,--the number, to wit, of
tippling-houses, where the laborer, as a matter of course,
spends the overplus of his earnings. In Scotland there are
few; and the Justices are commendably inexorable in
rejecting all application for licenses where {p.179} there
appears no public necessity for granting them. A man,
therefore, cannot easily spend much money in liquor, since
he must walk three or four miles to the place of suction and
back again, which infers a sort of _malice prepense_ of
which few are capable; and the habitual opportunity of
indulgence not being at hand, the habits of intemperance,
and of waste connected with it, are not acquired. If
financiers would admit a general limitation of the
ale-houses over England to one fourth of the number, I am
convinced you would find the money spent in that manner