violence, bloodshed, rapacity, despotism, and injustice,-that the eloquence of Burke himself has failed in recording an adequate reprobation. May God forgive our guilty country, and direct the thoughts of our present and future rulers to make whatever atonement may lie in their power, for outrages, which have rarely been surpassed in the annals of a fallen world.

:

Art. II. The Institutions of Popular Education. An Essay to which the Manchester Prize was adjudged. By the Rev. Richard Winter Hamilton, L. L.D., D.D. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co.; Jackson and Walford. 1845.

DR. HAMILTON has been honoured with the premium of one hundred guineas, promised by an unknown Churchman of Manchester' to the writer of the most valuable Essay on the best method of extending the benefits of Education to the people of England, consistently with the principles of civil and religious liberty.' By writing for this prize, he has continued to give his sanction to the prize essay system; and his opinion has such weight with us as to prevent, for a time at least, our saying what we should otherwise have deemed it right to say. The thought, however, will not be repressed, that whatever benefits the system has occasioned, its power to benefit is ebbing rapidly. The honour conferred on Dr. Hamilton, in the present instance, is really not very great. The invitation issued from Manchester failed to elicit more than fourteen essays. The honour of the successful competitor is, then, merely this; that thirteen essayists, we know not who, have each produced a work inferior to his; an honour that Dr. Hamilton will not rate very highly. Yet the proposed subject was more popular at the time of its proposal than any other, similarly introduced, has been; and we know of no subject likely to be so distinguished, on which it would be more easy to produce a volume that would be generally deemed respectable. We suppose, then, that the public, like ourselves, are beginning to feel weary of the system. And we the rather think this, from observing that the sale of a new prize essay, however popular its subject may be, and however renowned its writer, has lately been much less than it was wont to be. It is possible that Dr. Hamilton well deserves his hundred guineas as compensation for pecuniary loss, occasioned by the publication of his work as a prize essay, rather than as a perfectly independent volume. The common history of all

bounties upon produce is, to be first applauded as a blessing, then decried and relinquished as a curse.

But our congratulation of the author is modified by another and a much graver consideration. We are not sure that his book, good as it is, is so good as it would have been, had he prepared it for examination before no other tribunal than the public; and we attribute the supposed inferiority, not to the author, but to the system. We would be very cautious in stating what, from its nature, is not susceptible of proof. We allow, then, that if there be no counteracting causes, emulation will produce upon any competing essayist its usual effects. We do not deny that the essayist writing on some subjects, may be free from the action of such counteracting causes. He may enjoy perfect freedom, too, on some parts of the subject; on the other parts of which he may feel this action the most sensibly. But we maintain, at the same time, that the force of emulation must necessarily be thwarted whenever the proposed subject is already one of public discussion, not to say disputation, and the opinions of the adjudicators, if not unknown, are yet matters for probable conjecture. Dr. Hamilton would be among the last men to yield to the influences now indicated. We believe that, alive to their action, he would intentionally resist them. And yet we feel, and cannot but feel, when reading many parts of his book, that the writer composed them in restraint. The book is not to us the effusion of a mind in unattempted liberty and conscious ease.

Our readers must not imagine that any latent insinuation is directed in the above remarks against the three adjudicators; or that we suppose Dr. Hamilton to have had a doubt of their adequacy to their task. In assigning the premium to the author of the volume before us, it is quite certain that two of them, at least, Mr. Farrar and Mr. Kelly, must have been prompted by a conviction of its general merits and its suggestive power, rather than by its exhibition of those thoughts on some controverted points which they have been known to express publicly, or might reasonably be supposed to entertain. We have not seen one of the rejected essays, and cannot, therefore, conjecture whether the judgment pronounced would have been our own. But this we confidently and cheerfully maintain; that the adjudicators, in declaring Dr. Hamilton's essay to be the most valuable,' could have been actuated by none but the most worthy motives. The evidence of this is the contrast between sentiments which they have been known to express, or which are almost without exception held by men in their position, and those which are distinctly and earnestly advocated in the volume before us. Had not Dr. Hamilton been assured of

their deciding according to the comprehensive principles which evidently regulated their decision, they would not have been troubled to peruse a work of his.

We propose, instead of laying before our readers a dissertation of our own, to subject this essay to a strict review. And we engage in the task with the more pleasure, as we know that by none will our remarks be received with more candour, than by Dr. Hamilton himself. We should not have felt at liberty to make any remarks upon the dedication of this book to Lord Fitzwilliam, had his 'personal kindnesses' to the author occasioned it. But as the dedication is made to his lordship, 'solely on the grounds of his high character and patriotism,' we are constrained to express a doubt whether of every augury his opening career has been fulfilled.' He has disappointed our hopes less, perhaps, than any other of his early associates; but even Lord Fitzwilliam seems to us to sympathize with his order so as to degrade the people, and to care for the preservation of the exclusive privileges of a few, more than for the extension to the community of rights denied and advantages withheld.

After a brief advertisement,' explanatory of the title given to the essay, and introductory to the documents relating to the premium, the general plan of the work is exhibited; a most appropriate passage quoted from Plato, as a motto, together with another, less felicitous, from the late Samuel Whitbread, and the first chapter, containing Preliminary Thoughts on certain portions of our Population,' is then at once offered to our notice. The most important of these Thoughts' are-that increase of population is a blessing; that all men have equal right to sustenance; that this right implies, however, liability to labour; that common phrases betray us into forgetfulness of man's individuality; that communities often present peculiar phenomena to the statistic philosopher; that the population of Great Britain is at present in a very critical state; and that the removal at the same time of all restrictions upon trade in corn, and all special protections to labour, is consequently demanded. The chapter concludes with a table, showing the centesimal proportions of the population of the United Kingdom, at various ages, according to the census of 1841. The chapter is pervaded with a spirit of strong, healthy, and virtuous humanity. Its tone is English, yet cosmopolitic; patriotic, but not exclusive; natural, while christian. Speaking of the enlargement of the human family as in itself a blessing, according to the sacred volume,

'He

'God,' says our author, made the earth to be inhabited. hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.' Is the parent described? As arrows are in the hand

of a mighty man, so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.' Is the might of Thebes, with its hundred gates, proclaimed? It is populous No.' Guarding with holy jealousy and fearful judgment every violation of purity, consecrating marriage as the true source of human offspring,' no man can be an intruder in the world. His birth gives right of place and provision in it. Parental sin may, in the opinion of society, throw a shame around him. It may be the wisdom of society to treat him differently from the home-born child. But what if no inheritance greet him? What, if yearning and high anticipation have not hailed him? The genial fount of maternal nourishment was not denied the babe; and the joyless mother, in the sense of its undeserved wrong, has sometimes entwined it in only a fonder embrace. We need not fret ourselves with fears of too many guests for the banquet of nature. The prolificness of our kind has its own limits, and wants not our checks. He, who bids the poorest, has spread the board. He has established the proportion between the numbers and the viands. There is bread enough and to spare. Want may exist in the destitution of the means by which a share of that provision can only be obtained. That is not the inquiry. Is there necessity for that privation? Except in the arid or frozen waste, there is not local dearth; even their rigours may be overcome. Cultivation finds new powers in the most unyielding soil; ocean has scarcely been skimmed for its wealth. Let us welcome all who emerge among us into life, let us confess their equal title with our own, not daring to speak of anterior possession, not grudging one against another, nor charging God foolishly with a disparity which it is most profane to suppose. Justly and benevolently let us think of any imaginable addition of man as a happy consummation; as calling upon us for a more active and zealous discharge of the duties of philanthropy. O! precious is the life of man. Well may we hail him who now has begun to live for ever! . . How should we honour all men ! How unworthy is every contemptuous expression towards any on our tongues! Is he to be despised? Is he a vessel in which is no pleasure?' Each man is the brother for whom Christ died. None may be indifferent nor displeasing to us. We are our brother's keeper. The most distressed is most proximately our neighbour. We are debtors to all. We owe love one to another. The christian charity courses each drop of our common blood through all the windings of the human heart, and identifies all its great principles with universal man. And at least our native country makes a noble investment, though not more than just, for the needy. It has no Apothetæ, like Sparta, for the deformed infant; it provides, unlike the ancient Massagetai, no living grave for age.'-pp. 3-6.

We feel, and we believe, with Dr. Hamilton, in regard to the increase of our kind. It is a blessing; and the man who hates it, or does aught tending to prevent it, shows the spirit of a murderer, and strives to limit his Creator's honours. If there

be an outlaw from the universe, it is he. It follows, that the earth, considered as a unit, is the property of the human race, considered as a family; and that no man is authorized to believe himself endowed with a natural right of sustenance superior to that possessed by any other man. We adopt all that can be said to this effect; and we glory in it. But we do not see that our author employs the principles he so strenuously asserts, either for the great object of his Essay, or for any other. Asserted, as they commonly are, by those who plead for the education of the people according to act of parliament, they should not have been asserted by an advocate on the opposite side, without care to vindicate them from perversion. They form one of the favourite themes of demagogues desirous of general and unintelligent discontent. They are the staple materials of all who labour for a revolutionary agrarian law. The upholders of 'poor laws' and of national education,' generally think them among their strongholds; and there are those who maintain them chiefly, if not altogether, that they may exert a moral power over the actual and expectant holders of property, humanizing their social feelings towards men less favoured than themselves, and thus preventing the abuses to which the recognition and the defence of the acquired rights of property are liable. We place ourselves in the last class; but whether Dr. Hamilton would choose to join us, rather than those who speak of natural right as the foundation of 'poor laws,' we are not quite sure. He is opposed to national education, at least to every form of it proposed for adoption in this country; and he himself proposes none superior. But he earnestly supports 'poor laws,' and, as we think, upon the ground of all men's natural right to sustenance. The reference to them in the foregoing extract is one only of many.

We are constrained to conclude, from the whole of his references to this subject, that, while tracing the poor man's actual right to sustenance proximately to the law of the land, he considers this law as declaring and enforcing the natural right. We differ from him as to the alleged fact, believing the legal right to have been conferred in lieu of the natural right of begging, of which the poor man was deprived because mendicity was found the occasion of social nuisances and theft. While not allowed to practice mendicity—at all events, while his labour is fettered and his bread is taxed-we think, too, that he ought to have a legal right to ample support. But to build this right upon his natural right to sustenance, or to confound the two, appears to us the very way to put a bounty upon idleness,' and thus to pauperise the feeling of the humbler class.' We are not quite sure that our author has thus treated these two distinct