1. Not only do those of the poor who received instruction in these different schools, derive little advantage from them, but the great proportion of the very poor, receive no instruction at all; except from a few benevolent individuals, who, inspired by the humane and holy Spirit of the Great Teacher, seek them out in their hovels and cellars to do them good. While there are a considerable number of the established clergy, who, in imitation of their Master, have borne the light and consolation of Christianity to the dwellings of the impoverished and the ignorant, yet by most of them these masses are entirely overlooked. From the Report on the Colleries, it would seem that the Established Church has never done any thing for the tens of thousands of wretched slaves who toiled within the coal mines, knew nothing of their brutality and heathenism. Indeed it is quite evident, that the establishment has been one of the strongest barriers in the way of the elevation of the lower classes. Its pretension has always been to minister to the poor; but it has never done it. And this pretension for a long time prevented the public from doing much themselves. It was well known that large sums were raised to support the clergy, and diffuse light among the people; but it was long ago discovered that little had been done for the education of the poor except by Dissenters and benevolent individuals in the church.

2. But a greater evil than this exists. The

circumstances of the poor would oppose insurmountable obstacles to their education even were a school-house within a stones' throw of every one of their hovels. Their energies are too severely taxed in a slavish toil for bread, to leave spirit or strength for intellectual exertion. While whole communities are from year to year driven to the verge of starvation, so long, it will be idle to talk of their intellectual improvement. A few hours stolen once a week from premature labour, by the child who needs the whole day for rest, can accomplish nothing in the great work of education. Who would suppose that the child, whose energies of body and mind, had through the week, been paralyzed by suffering and toil, would feel inclined to give up to study the only day of rest.

In the "Essays on Education," published by the "Central Society," in England, I find the following language: "Taking the results elicited by the inquiries of the Manchester Statistical Society, as a fair measure of the education received by the children of the working classes in the country, and comparing it with what may be done, and what in other civilized countries has been done, for the education of the same class, the result is one which cannot be dwelt upon without some feeling of pain and humiliation. While in most of the German states, and in New-York, the government provides the schools for the working classes, with an ample supply of good and sufficient teachers, in England absolutely nothing

* * *

is done by the government or any other body for this purpose. It has been a common boast in England that in her public undertakings, the cooperation of private individuals had affected greater wonders than all the wealth and power of governments in foreign countries. In the great work of national education there is most assuredly no ground for such a boast. Private benevolence has effected something: but its efforts sink into hopeless insignificance, when compared with those of the governments of the German States."

The conclusion forced upon us from the testimony we have adduced, is, that among the working classes, which are by far the most numerous, · not more than one-half, so far as direct education is concerned, are in a condition very much better than barbarians!

In Scotland, (as all know,) the majority of the population are provided with the means of education, although in the manufacturing and highland districts, there are thousands no better off than heathen. Of Ireland it is unnecessary to speak here. Ignorance, poverty, hunger and nakedness, are the results of English tyranny, in that beautiful but miserable land. With Carlyle, we can say, "The woes of Ireland, or Justice to Ireland," is not the chapter we have to write at present. It is a deep matter; an analysmal one which no plummet of ours will sound. For the oppression has gone, far farther than into the

economics of Ireland, upwards to her very heart and soul."

In bringing to a close this faint but dreary picture of the woes of the poor, I again ask what has England yet done for the mass of her slave population at home? She has been experimenting on human suffering for a thousand years. While she has made her commerce and wealth eclipse that of Alexandria and Tyre-while she has extended her dominions over continents, and reared an empire greater than that of Rome-while she has enlarged the bounds of civilization in the earth, she has not yet achieved the first work of all just governments,—to supply the lowest physical wants of her people. But there is something more painful to contemplate than a famishing population-it is a population of heathen under the shadow of a christian throne.

BOOK THE SEVENTH.

IRELAND-HER WOES AND STRUGGLES UNDER ENGLISH OPPRESSION.

INSCRIBED TO

DANIEL O'CONNELL, AND FATHER MATTHEW.

ENGLISH GOVERNMENT IN IRELAND.-During the dreadful period of four hundred years, the laws of the English Government of Ireland did not punish the murder of one man of Irish blood as a crime.-Sir James Macintosh.

The stranger shall hear thy lament o'er his plains,
The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o'er the deep,
Till thy tyrants themselves, as they rivet thy chains,
Shall pause o'er the songs of their captives, and weep.

Moore.

In the mountains of the parish of Cong, when the potatoes fail them, they bleed their cattle and eat the boiled blood, sometimes mixed with meal, but often without it.-O'Connell.

Grattan declared that he had watched at the cradle of Ireland and followed her hearse. He is reckoned among the illustrious dead, I live to sound THE TRUMPET FOR HER RESURRECTION.— O'Connell.

The Sans-potatoe Irishman is of the self same stuff as the finest Lord Lieutenant! Not an individual Sans-potatoe human scarecrow but had a life given to him out of heaven, with eternities depending on it: for once and no second time, with immensity in him, over him, and round him: with feelings that a Shakspeare's speech could not utter: with desires illimitable as the autocrat of all the Russias -Carlyle.