"While the course of daily living was hard to the working man, and his future precarious, the Law was very cruel. The records of the Assizes in the Chronicle of Events are sickening to read. The vast and absurd variety of offences for which men and women were sentenced to death by the score, out of which one-third or so were really hanged, gives now an impression of devilish levity in dealing with human life; and must, at the time, have precluded all rational conception on the part of the many, as to what Law is, to say nothing of that attachment to it, and reverence and trust in regard to it, which are indispensable to the true citizen temper."

"The general health was at a lower average among all these distresses than was even safe for a people who might at any moment have to struggle for their existence. The habit of intemperance in wine was still prevalent among gentlemen, so that we read of one public man after another whose death or incapacity was ascribable to disease from. drinking. Members of the cabinet, members of parliament and others, are quietly reported to have said this and that when they were drunk. The spirit decanters were brought out in the evenings in middle-class houses, as a matter of course; and gout and other liver and stomach disorders were prevalent to a degree which the children of our time have no conception of. During the scarcity, the diseases of scarcity abounded, of course."

But allow me in a moment to relieve the picture. You all know how mighty and universal has been the movement of the nineteenth century. The axe has been laid at the root of the tree. There has

been a patient, hopeful, scientific and learned, as well as a pious, philanthropy. The disease was a radical disease. The cure is a radical reform. The recognition of the people, of their wants and woes, their essential capacity, their rights, their progressive tendency, their citizenship, their humanity, the oneness of man with his brother man, the benignant fatherhood of Almighty God,-this recognition, which exposes the littleness of worldly distinction in the presence of this unity of the brotherhood, has waked up the intelligence, the heart and soul of England, to the work of studious and persistent reform, as radical as the malady of which Love is the healer and Justice the medicine.

Dating back from the middle to the beginning of this nineteenth century, what had been accomplished in this work? The vice of drunkenness had gradually disappeared, with the coarseness, of which it was the natural expression, giving way to those humanizing and refining influences, with which sensual and brutal manners are inconsistent.

"One of the most distinguished of Frenchmen comes as ambassador to England in 1840, and regarding with a philosophical intelligence both the great and the humble, he thus contrasts the past

with the present. Looking back to the end of the eighteenth century, he says that there were at that time, even in the elevated classes of English society, many remains of gross and disorderly manners. Precisely because England had been for centuries a country of liberty, the most opposite results of that liberty had been developed in startling contrasts. A puritan severity was maintained side by side with the corruptions of the courts of Charles II. and the first Georges; habits almost barbarous kept their hold in the midst of the progress of civilization; the splendor of power and of riches had not banished from the higher social regions the excesses of a vulgar intemperance. Even the elevation of ideas and the supremacy of talent did not always carry with them delicacy of taste; for the Sheridan who had been electrifying parliament by his eloquence might the same night bave been picked up drunk in the streets."

"M. Guizot goes on to say, 'It is in our time that these shocking incongruities in the state of manners in England have vanished, and that English society has become as polished as it is free; where gross habits are constrained to be hidden or to be reformed, and where civilization is day by day showing itself more general and more harmonious.'

Two conditions of progress, he continues, which rarely go together, have been developed and attained during half a century in England. The laws of morality have been strengthened, and manners have at the same time become softer, less inclined to violent excesses, more elegant." *

This eminent French writer and statesman says also that the double progress of a stricter morality, and a refinement of manners, was not confined to the higher and middle classes, but was very apparent amongst the bulk of the people. "The domestic life, laborious and regular, extends its empire over these classes. They comprehend, they seek, they enjoy, more honest and more delicate pleasures than brutal quarrels or drunkenness. The amelioration is certainly very incomplete. Gross passions and disorderly habits are always fermenting in the bosom of obscure and idle misery; and in London, Manchester, or Glasgow, there are ample materials for the most hideous descriptions. But take it all in all, civilization and liberty have in England, during the course of the nineteenth century, turned to the profit of good rather than of evil. Religious faith, Christian charity, philanthropic benevolence, the

* Popular History of England, by Charles Knight, Vol. viii., pp. 401, 402.

intelligent and indefatigable activity of the higher classes, and good sense spread amongst all classes, have battled, and now battle effectually against the vices of society, and the evil inclinations of human nature." "

This progress was not mechanical. It was dynamic. It was not Jewish, nor Mohammedan; but it was Christian. It was not due to law, but to liberty. It came not from the thunders of burning Sinai, but from the silent inward voice.

A writer in the "Democratic Review," in 1848, discussing the topic of "Poverty and Misery " in their relation to "Reform and Progress," mainly in the direction of politics, laments the apparent defeat of the people in the successive popular struggles of the old world. He records the continued existence of the old poverty and misery, with modifications only, notwithstanding the promise which heralded the revolutions of that period. He turns from cause to cause, from the nostrum of one political doctor to the palmistry of another, and slides at last into an exclamation of despair at the experience of the old world, and the prospect at home, in view of the unknown cause of what he discovered at last

* Guizot-"Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de mon temps," Tome v., 1862.