selves, who discharged their functions as hosts to the Congress of Industries with a geniality and selfrespect that reflect the highest credit on the national character.

The urbanity and earnest cordiality which pervaded the great gathering become the more deserving of honourable record, when we reflect on the miscellaneous nature of the multitude of which it was composed. Here were nearly all the tongues of the world struggling together for utterance; all varieties of costumes and manners jostling each other in the narrow and crowded galleries and passages; and out of this Babel of heterogeneous nationalities, the very shock and strangeness of which might have been expected, under the most civilizing auspices, to have led to misapprehension and disorder, we are not aware that a single misunderstanding or personal disagreement interrupted the common enjoyment. That no such results ensued, may be referred, we sincerely believe, to the influence of the English character, and the confidence inspired amongst foreigners by the rational freedom and security of our institutions. We do not mean to assert that in no other country would such an experiment have passed off with a similar success; but we are justified in assuming it as a proof of the ascendancy in this country of law and common sense over the passions, jealousies, and tendency to excitement, which are inseparable from the collection of great multitudes of people. We may go further than this, and ask-Is there any other country in Europe, in which such an experiment could be ventured upon at this moment with safety? Is there any other country in which the government could calculate so

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curely upon the support of the masses; and in which the preservation of order could be entrusted with such certainty of a faithful response to the body of the people at large? A few printed regulations posted on the walls, and no greater employment of the civil force than was indispensably necessary to keep the approaches clear, were found sufficient for all purposes. The strangers who came amongst us on

must have been struck by the absence of military display. Neither sabre nor bayonet glittered in their eyes. A constable's staff was the only weapon that made its appearance, and when it did, it was more for ceremony than use. We, who are accustomed to these pacific demonstrations, and who never require the presence of a soldier to enforce respect for the law, and who, nevertheless, enjoy a freer expression of opinion in public and private, in our newspapers and lecture-rooms, than any other nation in the universe, whose coffee-houses and taverns are never beset by spies, or broken in upon by armed mercenaries, whose hearths are sacred, and to whom political arrests, without ample justification and open trial, are utterly unknown-we see nothing very surprising in all this; but we are mistaken if it did not make an impression, not to be easily effaced, on the minds of our visitors. Some of them have had unexpected opportunities since their return home, of forming comparisons between the practical liberty which is protected by the allegiance of a people to laws of their own making, and that theoretical liberty which looks so dazzling upon paper, but which perishes the moment it is attempted to be put into action, leaving nothing behind but anarchy and despotism.

In looking back, however, upon the prominent features of the year, we discover other incidents upon which we cannot congratulate ourselves quite so complacently. The serenity of the population on great public occasions, offers a strange and painful contrast to the inexplicable increase which has latterly taken place in crimes of the most revolting and savage nature. We are not in possession of the requisite statistics to enable us to speak with accuracy upon this subject; can we venture to speculate as to the ratio in which such crimes have advanced within the last twelve months upon the returns of former years. But, that they have made a fearful advance we have no hesi

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the ordinary average; we have no means of ascertaining that fact. But, in certain directions, offences have multiplied upon us which have seldom been exceeded for heartlessness and depravity. The domestic life of England has always been distinguished by its purity and high moral tone. In no country are the household affections cherished with more ardour-or relations of society and the sexes held in more earnest respect. We are even in the habit of considering ourselves in our domestic character as a model for imitation, and of reckoning, amongst the rest of our virtues, that we are the best husbands, the best guardians of youth, and the most exemplary and provident parents in the world. This boast, even if it be a vain exaggeration of our merits, is at least in some sort a proof of the value we attach to those attributes, since it shows how desirous we are to be thought to possess them. How then does it happen that scarcely a day passes in which our daily journals do not record a case of appalling cruelty and brutal ferocity, happening somewhere in the crowded dens of towns, or filling peaceful villages and rural districts with horror and alarm? We do not allude to burglaries and acts of violence in the public streets or lonely by-roads. These are the inevitable consequences of the vices that are engendered by want, and suffering, and lack of employment. The crimes to which we refer are of a different order, and cannot be traced to the physical destitution of the people.

It is easy enough to comprehend the lamentable violations of law to which men are driven by starvation, or by the demoralizing influence of political agitation; but we cannot find in any of these causes a solution of that atrocious spirit which tempts monsters in the shape of men into the commission of barbarities on their own hearths, from which our common humanity instinctively recoils. When the murderer selects the objects of his demoniacal revenge from the classes by whom he supposes himself to be oppressed-when the robber, in a state of mental perturbation, with the terrors of discovery and punish

ment before him, slays the struggling victim in the dark, there is a kind of dismal human passion in his guilt, which is at least intelligible; but what shall be said of the wretched criminal who wreaks his fiendish rage upon the helpless beings who are clustered about him -to whom he is bound by the most sacred obligations-who have shared in his miseries and privations, ministered to his wants, and cheered him in his sorrows-who have incurred, for his sake, the contumely and loathing of the world-and who are entitled, by every claim of nature and circumstance, to his tenderness and protection?

Isolated instances of pure savagery happen in all countries; but, until recently, we have never known the criminal records of England to be darkened, day after day, by an appalling succession of horrors, happily of rare occurrence amongst us, and which can be accounted for only on the ground of that infatuation which great crimes are said to exercise over the imagination of the ignorant and depraved. The affair of Madame Lafarge in France, accompanied by a variety of melodramatic accessories, and linked with a story of ghastly sentimentality, produced numerous pitiful imitations. In a country where the mariage de convenance is productive of domestic conditions frequently at war with the natural affections, and where social morals and marital rights are held in not much higher respect than as affording materials for the comedies of Scribe and the novels of Balzac and George Sand, it was not surprising that the slow poisoning of husbands, under similarly romantic provocation, should have acquired a temporary popularity. But we have no such excuses to make to ourselves here in England, where the foundations of society are laid deeply in religious convictions, and a man's house is no less the castle' of civil liberty than the temple of the domestic virtues. The crimes to which we have alluded are, therefore, the more strange, because they not only do not spring from any vice or infidelity inherent to the constitution of our society, but are notoriously alien to the character, habits, and feelings of the

whole community. Every element and attribute of our nationality cries aloud against acts of unmanly brutality perpetrated upon women and children; and in such deeds do these outrages for the most part consist.

One day we read of a savage coming home drunk at night, and deliberately, or, as the case may be, in an access of uncontrollable fury, beating out his wife's brains, kicking her to death, and flinging her out of the window. Sometimes the victim is a miserable woman, who has clung to her brutal tyrant through years of ill-treatment, trusting to his manhood, with no hope but in the depth of his charity, faithless to herself, but faithful to him, yet who has failed to propitiate his mercy or his confidence, and is at last butchered in a fit of jealousy, or in lack of more drink, which she has not the means of supplying. Another time it is a case of infanticide, committed under circumstances of incredible ferocity. An infant of three years old was slaughtered a few weeks ago by a monster who, not having sufficiently satisfied his frenzy by dragging it out of its cradle, and beating its head against the floor, repeated the horrible act several times during the night, until its cries were stilled in death. More recently, in a remote part of the country, an old man and a servant who lived with him, were discovered crouching together over a blazing fire, in which they were destroying the offspring of their mutual guilt, to avert the lesser shame and ignominy of its detection! An alarming number of instances of this natureof lusts and ferocious passions wreaked upon confiding and defenceless objects-have been brought to light by the newspapers during the last few months. Some of the perpetrators of them have been consigned to justice; others yet await their trial and punishment. When we read of these things, we ask-Is it in moral England they have occurred? Is it true that we are in that debased condition depicted so forcibly by Mr. Laing as existing in Sweden, where, with the most perfect system of education pervading all ranks, and under an exterior of the most formal decorum, with the strictest outward conformity to all the observances of church-going and religious ceremo

nials, the darkest depravity is practised in secret, of which such criminalities as these are only the cases that have been found out?

Happily, we can answer that question in the negative. There is little concealed or varnished over by a gloss of sanctity in the outward life of this country. The English character, with all its faults and blemishes, is patent to the whole world. The peasant and the artisan -under the pressure of the worst circumstances-are open and manly, and when they fall into guilty courses, they do not superadd to the rest of their vices any shamming of virtue and morality. That sort of masked villany is exclusively confined to the chaunters, thimbleriggers, dog-stealers, horse-jockeys, and other professional rogues. The thorough English housebreaker and footpad, who sometimes becomes a murderer in a moment of nervous alarm or ruthless desperation, is at least a bold and formidable scoundrel, who carries his evil passions plainly advertised on his beetling brows, scowling eyes, and dogged mouth, whose lounging and skulking walk gives you fair notice of his qualities, and whom you would instinctively avoid, if you happened to meet him on a lonely road. The atrocities of which we are speaking, and which have been so fearfully numerous in the last quarter of the expired year, are exceptional examples of a ferocious spirit as alien to the feelings of the lower orders themselves as it is to the more refined and humane. The best proof of the abhorrence in which even the street idlers of the populations of the towns hold such crimes is the indignation they vent openly against the criminals. It frequently happens that the police are compelled to convey culprits of this description by stealth to prison, in order to avoid the summary vengeance of the mob, who, in this mode at all events, are eager to show that they do not sympathize with them, and who, if they were permitted, would be only too glad to take the law into their own hands.

Lord Shaftesbury has touched the spring of these revolting offences, when he traces them to the inordinate use of ardent spirits. The ginpalace is the Court of the demon that raises up these unnatural lusts

and ferocious jealousies and hatreds; the Elysée where all the sanguinary passions are awakened and inflamed, which are afterwards to find their issues in the blood of women and children at home. A fit of intoxication acting upon the shattered system of a man, weak in mind and body from continued privation, and who, perhaps, has nursed darkly in his heart, right or wrong, a feeling of bitterness and revenge against his fellow-men, is, in reality, for the time, a fit of insanity-although, seeing how it is produced, and how it may be avoided, we dare not treat it so in our adjudication of its responsibility. If this be true in incidental cases, how much more fiercely and dangerously must these moods of violence operate on men who have constantly fed their evil dispositions by a long course of similar indulgences, and whose moral faculties are perverted and destroyed by the fatal influence of stimulants which cloud their reason, enfeeble their resolutions for good, and render them at last unable to take their place in the honest labour of the day-light world? The physical elasticity and strength first give way; the muscles become flaccid and powerless; the head, reeling with giddiness, settles into a condition of permanent confusion and incapacity; then the moral perceptions fail, and all the relations and responsibilities of life become changed and distorted; the affections no longer exercise their healthy sway; indifference and then despair set in; and so, step by step, sinking lower and lower in the social scale, and losing all interest in the ties and objects that surround him, the wretched and isolated man becomes the prey of morbid sensations and demoniacal suggestions, which finally convert him into a monster, who terminates his miserable career by an act as abhorrent to his original nature as it is to our common humanity.

This is a very old story; but it is not the less grievous on that account. We are far from thinking that the evil is to be remedied by temperance societies. Tea and toast, dreary speeches, stuffed with the tritest and sleepiest commonplaces, finishing with a rantipole dance or a ragged concert, will not go a great way towards lifting up the poor out of

the temptations of their Elysée. Wholesome beer is not to be thus banished from the dietary of the hard-working labourer, who is as much entitled to his comforts as the squire, and stands much more in need of them. The task of regeneration must be addressed to the common-sense and material interests of the lower classes; we must not try to make martyrs of them to abstract principles; we must not, for the sake of endeavouring to realize a community of water-drinkers, leap over all intervening encouragements to temperance in the improvement of their dwellings, in the cheapening of the necessaries of life, in sound and accessible education, and in cultivating on all sides an active and practical sympathy in their welfare. The question, in all its bearings, is perfectly well understood by the fower classes themselves. They are already awakened to a clear sense of their situation, and of the helps and hindrances of all sorts that are in their path; but the power is not altogether in their own hands by which the moral elevation we desiderate is to be brought about. The views recently promulgated by Lord Shaftesbury and the Earl of Carlisle contain the elements of all that is needful to be known or done on behalf of the labouring masses; and when the middle and upper grades of society shall have entered more generally and cordially into the good work, we may look for a purer atmosphere in places at present fetid and corrupt from neglect and penury. Hitherto there have been misapprehensions and unfounded distrusts on both sides. The poor have been too much inclined to regard the rich as callous to their sufferings; while the rich have not had enough of faith in the willingness of the poor to accept their sympathy, and profit by their kindly offices. These errors are wearing out. A juster feeling is growing up; and if we can only diminish the influence of the ginpalaces, not by shutting them up, or by attempting to substitute weak tea for strong liquors, but by giving the frequenters of these establishments more temptations for cultivating the provident enjoyments of home, than for going out to seek wasteful excitements abroad, we may calculate upon

a considerable reduction of the crimes that have of late so heavily disgraced our calendar.

We find that we have unconsciously dropped into a vein of seriousness which we certainly never contemplated at starting. But the year is as full of varieties as an April day; and if we are to indulge in the sunshine, we must take our chance for a little squall of rain and clouds. There are other matters besides our criminal statistics to gossip about, and which ought not to be forgotten in a valedictory rhapsody. For instance, the acquisition we have made in political wisdom under the professor who paid us a flying visit the other day on his way to America. We have hived up one of his phrases as a word and an idea for the next edition of the English dictionary-the dictionary-the 'solidarity of the peoples! The lectures we have listened to upon that phrase-luminous in treatment, and in all conscience full enough in bulk-ought to have made its meaning clear; but, we confess, the more we have endeavoured to understand it, the more opaque it has become to us. At first, we thought we had a glimmer of light-but it was only a stray ignis-fatuus that danced before us in the eloquence of Kossuth, and now it is pitch-dark again. Nobody should rejoice more than we should in the solidarity' of the 'peoples,' if solidarity' mean good feeding. We know that there is solidarity' in beef and mutton-the only description of 'solidarity' our 'people' are likely to care much about looking after in their intercourse with other 'peoples; but we are afraid that patriotism on the continent is of too transcendental a nature to descend to such gross considerations. does not aim at achieving solidarity' in the way of supplying its peoples' with the means of growing lusty and strong; but, on the contrary, takes the most efficient methods of keeping them as nearly as possible to starvation point, and of cutting them off in the flower of their lean enthusiasm. Now this it is that puzzles us. The English people' have no reliance upon political principles that have an inevitable tendency towards short commons; they will not put their trust in a solidarity' that threatens, by a mysterious contradiction in

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terms and consequences, to reduce them to a condition of physical emaciation; and however highly other 'peoples' may think of it, the blouses and bourgeoisie of this country are by no means inclined to fraternize with any race of heroes, be they never so grand in their devotion to free institutions, who carry their notions of freedom to that perilous extremity. The word, nevertheless, may be engrafted upon our vocabulary as a new word, meaning exactly the contrary of what it apparently expresses; just as a gibbet was hailed by the shipwrecked traveller as an evidence that he had been cast upon a land of civilization.

Amongst the legacies bequeathed to us by the past year, for which we have rather more reason to be thankful, is the reduction in the fares of the omnibuses that run through the arteries of our metropolis, to be followed, as no doubt it will be, by a similar reduction in the fares of all other local conveyances all over the kingdom. This matter may seem too petty for special record. The reader who entertains this opinion, and who, probably, never was in an omnibus in his life, may be assured that he is mistaken. One of the great agents of civilization by which the Romans confirmed and preserved their world-wide conquests, was the art of road-making, in which, as many of their remains which survive to the present day attest, they preeminently excelled. Of what use would roads be if there were not carriages to traverse them? And of what avail would carriages be if the public at large were to be excluded from making use of them by exorbitant charges? We will not argue the point; but take it for granted that everybody must see as plainly as we do, the infinite advantages that must arise from the inauguration of an extensive system of cheap conveyances.

The honour of having invented the omnibus is due to M. Baudry, a native of Nantes. The first omnibus that ever ran made its appearance in the streets of that city in the year 1826; and in the short space of time that has since intervened, the manufacture of that most convenient of popular vehicles has extended to all parts of the world. Even in the sandy environs of Cairo you are whisked to