In other words, let the eldest sons live upon their paternal estates, and the younger upon the public! This is, in fact, the state of things as it at present exists, which gives up every office in the country to interest and patronage, the consequence of which is, that we have the worst diplomatists, the worst public accountants, the worst civil employés in Europe. Lord B. or C. has a second son to be provided for, and if the government expect to command his vote in Parliament, the said son must be placed forthwith in a public office, whether he be fit for it not; and he is there to be retained and paid, whether he attend to his duties or not, whether he perform them in a slovenly manner, or otherwise. This is the very system against which the country has again and again raised its most indignant voice, and yet this is the precious system for which Dr. Chalmers prays. Perpetua esto!! It is true that he subsequently qualifies his opinion by expressing a hope, that public offices might also be open to candidates of merit. But such a hope is expressed by way of smoothing the matter as much as possible, for he must very well know, that it would be supremely ridiculous, in such a country as this, to place humble merit in competition with aristocratic influence.

Another of the great subjects which Dr. Chalmers discusses is Emigration,' to which, however, he attaches very little importance, as a means of keeping down our redundant population. He calculates, that, in order to accomplish this object, it must be about at least half a million of human beings every year, and he asks whence the fund is to come which would be required to sustain the expense of so immense a flotilla? To this difficulty he adds another, the diminution every year, supposing such an emigration to take place, of lands abroad fit for cultivation. The longer such a scheme should be prosecuted, the more impracticable, of course, it would become, and we suppose that no person would think of proposing it as a permanent remedy for thinning such a population as ours. One of the means for the attainment of that desirable object suggested by the author is, a system of education which would impress upon the minds of the poor the imprudence of early marriages, or of any marriages, unless they had previously acquired the means of maintaining their offspring. This we fearlessly pronounce to be a mere Utopian conception. No education which the lower orders of this country are likely to receive, will ever prevent them from forming early and imprudent marriages, or, what are still worse, improper connections. The question is, whether the children of the labouring classes shall be legitimate or illegitimate. In a financial point of view it little matters whether they be of one description or the other; in a moral point of view it matters a great deal, and it is, therefore, better on the whole that marriages should be encouraged. It is undoubtedly true, that the compulsory maintenance which is provided for the poor, has the effect of increasing the number of marriages among the lower orders beyond all reasonable

proportion, and at very early ages. This is a grievous misfortune, for which the country is paying an immense annual penalty in the shape of poor rate; and although, at best, emigration would afford but a small relief in the amount of this penalty, yet independently of this consideration, we should wish to see a regular system established, by the application of which a certain number of paupers might be enabled, from time to time, to endeavour to ameliorate their condition in our colonies, or elsewhere abroad. It is believed that our foreign possessions, speaking principally of the Canadas, New South Wales, and India (if India were opened), would afford "ample space and verge enough" to upwards of twenty millions of human beings. It certainly would not require any great effort from the different parishes in the kingdom to defray, at an economical rate, the passage to the colonies or elsewhere, of four or five hundred thousand individuals per annum: it would require scarcely more than would be adequate to their maintenance at home; and if the whole of the parochial assessments to the poor throughout England, were placed under the control of one central administration, nearly half the fund required would be gained by mere economy of management. If, in addition to this alteration, it were made a rule of law, that every able-bodied person applying for relief, should have the choice of either going out as an emigrant, or of forfeiting his claim for an allowance at home, a very great and effectual reformation would thereby take place in the execution of the poor law, which has been so strangely perverted from its original intentions. As this law is now administered, we think that the author describes its operation with great truth. We are rather surprised, however, that he did not observe how much of his argument on this subject is equally applicable to taxes in general.

'It is evident, that every levy upon property for the support of the indigent, trenches on the means of its owners for the employment and maintenance of the disposable population. There is no new provision created under such an economy. A part of the old provision is simply transferred, or withdrawn, from the sustenance of one class, to the sustenance of another class. Every additional impost that is laid upon me in the shape of poor's rate, lessens my ability to support those industrious who are remunerated for their services by my expenditure. Supplies are provided for the destitute in one quarter of society, at the expence, not of my enjoyments alone, but of privations to those who minister these enjoyments in another quarter of society. And, accordingly, it has been well observed, that, for all the visible relief effected by a poor's tax, there is as much of real though unseen poverty created among those, who have not yet entered within the territory of pauperism, but stand, a countless and untold multitude, around the very margin of it. The distress is not swept off from the face of the community. It is only shifted to another, and generally a far more deserving class of sufferers-to a mass of respectable families on the verge of destitution; struggling against the hard necessity of descending amongst the throng of sturdy applicants for a legalized charity; and all the more hopeless of relief, that the springs of gratuitous benevolence have

been well nigh dried up, by the heavy impositions which the artificial or compulsory system has laid on the upper classes of society. It is thus, that, by a sort of festering and spreading operation, the sphere of destitution is constantly widening in every parish, where the benevolence of love has been superceded by the benevolence of law. Generally speaking, every year, or at least every decade of years, the pauperism, like a moral leprosy, makes a wider sweep among the families than before.'-pp. 399 -401.

Nor do we think that Dr. Chalmers in the least exaggerates the consequences which are likely eventually to follow from this state of things.

'But the full effects of such a system will be anticipated by its own violent overthrow. From its very nature it cannot last; containing, as it does, within itself, the sure seeds of dissolution. The radical error of a poor's law consists, in its assigning the same treatment to an indeterminate, which is proper only to a determinate virtue. The virtue of humanity ought never to have been legalized, but left to the spontaneous workings of man's own willing and compassionate nature. Justice, with its precise boundary and well-defined rights, is the fit subject for the enactments of the statutebook; but nothing can be more hurtful and heterogeneous, than thus to bring the terms, or the ministrations of benevolence, under the bidding of authority. This fatal mistake involves in it a great deal more than a mere scholastic incongruity; or, but the commission of violence on an abstract principle. So nicely adapted is the mechanism of human society, to the axioms of the most deeply, if but soundly philosophical jurisprudence, that any law which contravenes these, will soon betray the flaw in its principle, by the palpable mischief which it works on the face of the commonwealth. The claims of justice are definite and precise, and withal, strictly accordant to the natural sense of morality; so that the law which enforces these, while it compels the observance of certain intelligible limits and lines of demarcation, is acquiesced in by the general mind of society. But the law which would enforce charity can fix no limits, either to the ever-increasing wants of a poverty which itself hath created, or to the insatiable desires and demands of a population, whom itself hath corrupted and led astray. Under this system, all is lax, and precarious, and indefinite. The holders of property can see no end to the exactions of pauperism. And the nurslings of pauperism, with their constantly increasing number and necessities, will overpass every limit in their aggressions upon property. The growing alarm on the one side, the growing distress upon the other, form the sure elements of an interminable warfare, which, if not prevented by timely reformation, must at length effervesce into an anarchy, that will alike sweep off all the good and evil of present institutions, and make room on the desolated void for the foundations of a new-modelled commonwealth.

'We should most gladly abjure this whole argument, could we think that the charity of law at all lessened the amount of human suffering, or that distress was not far more effectually, as well as kindly met by the charity of spontaneous nature. Could the ministrations of relief have been provided for by law and justice, then compassion may have been dispensed with as a superfluous part of the human constitution: whereas the very insertion of such a feeling or tendency within us, is proof in itself, of a some

thing separate and additional for it to do; of a distinct province in human affairs, within which this fine sensibility of the heart met with its appropriate objects, and, by its right acquittal of them, fulfilled the design which nature had in so endowing us. But by this unfortunate transmutation, this metamorphosis of a thing of love into a thing of law, this invasion by justice beyond its own proper domain on the field of humanity-nature has been traversed in her arrangements, and the office of one human faculty has been awkwardly and mischievously transferred to another. And the effect is just what might be always anticipated, when the laws and adaptations of divine wisdom are contravened by the short-sighted policy of man. Justice should have been left to do the things of justice; and humanity to do the things of humanity. But by the aggression of the one upon the other, this beautiful and beneficent order has been thwarted, and the consequence has been a very sore aggravation to the ills of society. By the interference of law with the business of charity, a two-fold mischief has been wrought. Human distress has been multiplied, and human compassion, its natural protector, has been weakened and paralyzed. And by the truly unfortunate meeting of these two consequences, there has been left, as the compound and aggravated result of both, a tenfold burden of unrelieved suffering upon the community. We say not, that the charity of compassion would have overtaken all the distress. But we say, that the charity of compulsion has fallen many times short of it, beside the bitterness and the poison which it infuses into the morale of society; lighting up a thousand jealousies and heart-burnings between the poor and the rich; and converting an interchange of good-will on the one side, and gratitude on the other, into a conflict of fierce and rancorous antipathies between these two great parties in the commonwealth,'-pp. 415-418.

The grand conclusion to which Dr. Chalmers draws the whole of his elaborate argument is this, that the great bulk of the people must be taught to restrain their passions, through the medium of a thorough Christian education, conducted chiefly by the clergy, in their different parishes. He gives a picture of all the good that a country pastor might do, who attended diligently to the performance of all his duties. The picture is undoubtedly a very fascinating one, but we fear that he has borrowed it from his imagination; for certainly none here can find the living original. Indeed, he admits that his suggestion is a visionary one, as far as religion is concerned; but then he speaks of a secondary effect of Christianity, which, without converting to religious belief, attracts to the paths of civilization and humanity, many persons, upon whom its more sublime truths are lost. We do not know that by such an education as this, even if we should suppose it to be in general operation, the lower orders of the people would gain much, upon the whole. Education which is not based upon religion, and which does not comprehend a thorough belief in Christianity, as one of its most essential elements, is an injury, and not a benefit. It leads only to false notions of equality with the higher classes, to presumption, ignorance, and infidelity. We should greatly prefer the total absence of education among the lower orders, to such a delusive

illumination as this. 'One man,' says our author, 'of decided piety, in a little vicinage, will impress, if not his own piety, at least the respectability of his habits and appearance, on the greater number of its families.' In other words, will make them hypocrites, pharisees-that is all.

Dr. Chalmers is a very bold thinker, a bold and sometimes an eloquent writer; though he occasionally uses a kind of phraseology which is not English. In politics he is a rank Tory, under the pretext of being a faithful friend of the people; and in religion, he is decidedly a high churchman, although a minister of the kirk of Scotland. His book may excite enlightened minds to pay attention to the various important subjects which he treats, but we fear that it will give them very little information which they did not possess before, or furnish them with more than one or two suggestions, which they can have any hope of reducing to practice.

ART. VII.-Fauna Boreali-Americana: or the Zoology of the Northern Parts of British America; containing Descriptions of the Objects of Natural History collected on the late Northern Land Expeditions under command of Captain Sir John Franklin, R. N. Part Second. The Birds. By W. Swainson, Esq., F. R. S., &c., and J. Richardson, M. D., F. R. S., &c., Surgeon and Naturalist to the Expeditions. Illustrated by numerous Plates and Wood-cuts. Published under the authority of the Right Hon. the Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs. 4to. pp. 589. London: Murray. 1832.

It gives us much gratification to find a scientific work of any description published under the authority of any department of our government. At the same time we must say, that our official authorities have not hitherto been very successful in the selection of the productions to which they have thus extended their patronage. We cheerfully acknowledge, that they have usefully applied the public money in the equipment of the several expeditions which have been sent out for the purposes of adding to our geographical knowlege, in rewarding the gentlemen who particularly distinguished themselves on those occasious, and in affording them every requisite assistance in the subsequent publication of their journals. But it must be admitted, that the merely scientific results of those expeditions bear no proportion to their expense, and the reason is obvious. Naval officers, draughtsmen, engineers, surgeons, were sent out in abundance, as members of the expeditions; but of naturalists, botanists, and mineralogists, the supply was ridiculously scanty. Upon both Captain Franklin's expeditions, for instance, Dr. Richardson was the official naturalist; yet it would hardly be believed, if he had not himself candidly confessed the fact, that at the period of his appointment he was altogether 'ignorant of ornithology.' This is his own phrase. In addition to this, it would seem that while he was accompanying Captain Franklin, so short a