the products of our own country; and that as the price of our manufactured articles must in the end be diminished, as they are produced on a larger scale, we shall be better enabled to compete with rival manufacturing countries.

There is scarcely any tract of country in the world so adapted to manufactures as our northern counties. Their coal-fields, lying at so small a distance below the surface, furnish them with the first necessary of manufactures at a cheap rate; their hills attract the clouds of the Atlantic and provide them with a never-failing supply of water from the mountain streams, for their bleaching, dyeing, and printing operations; their proximity to great ironmines enables them to obtain the materials for their machinery, at a price little raised above that at the mine's mouth; whilst their vicinity to the sea, their harbours, their numerous canals and their railroads, afford every facility for the importation of raw materials and the exportation of manufactured goods.

The progress of those districts in the last fifty years has been very remarkable. The population of Lancashire, which in 1801 amounted to only 672,731, had increased in 1841 to 1,667,054; whilst that of Yorkshire, which in 1801 was 858,892, had risen in 1841 to 1,591,480! The number of vessels, which paid dock duties in the port of Liverpool in 1751, was 220, and their tonnage was 19,176 tons; but in 1840 their num bers had increased to 15,998, and their tonnage to 2,445,708 tons! But the most astonishing proof of the growth of our manufacturing resources, in the production of cotton and woollen goods, iron and hardware, watches, jewellery, leather, linen, silk, glass, earthenware, paper, and hats, is, that the total quantity of our exports are at least FOUR times greater at present, than they were fifty years ago!

If such is the progress, which our commerce has made, notwithstanding foreign hostile tariffs, occasioned partly by our own legislation, what will be the limit to its future prosperity when we have, by opening our ports to the world, diminished the number of the protective tariffs of other countries? With the vast markets of the East, as yet almost unexplored; with the markets of the agricultural States of America and Europe inviting exchange; with the gradually-increasing demands of Africa and South America; and with the improvement in the home market, consequent on the improved condition of the labourers, we may safely predict, that great as the progress of our commerce and the development of our industry has been in past years, they will be still more remarkable in the next half century.

But what will be the necessary accompaniment of this extension of our commercial system? A still greater accumulation of masses of labourers, and a still more rapid increase in the numbers of our population, throughout all the mining and manufacturing districts of the kingdom. Who can say what their numbers will amount to in another fifty years?

But are we prepared to increase this population, without attempting to change its character? Is it safe, to say the least of it, to multiply indefinitely a population improvident, ignorant and irreligious? Is no danger to be apprehended from a recurrence of slack times, and from the impossibility of employing a multitude of untutored beings, few of whom have thought of laying by anything against a time of scarcity?

Sad omens for the future condition of these districts show themselves, in the irreligion and disaffection, in the immorality and degradation, and during times of bad

trade, in the sufferings and turbulence of their existing population, left, as they are, to grovel in their ignorance and improvidence, with opportunities of education afforded them, so totally insufficient, that all Europe cries shame.

Even if we suppose the education given in our present schools to be tolerably effective, yet the tables given at the end of this work, will shew, how little it is diffused in the most populous of these districts; but when we consider in addition, the defective character of the instruction given in these schools; the miserable education of the schoolmasters; the number of schools, which fall under the denomination of dame schools or of private schools, i. e. schools undertaken generally by poor, illiterate men, as a means of earning their bread; and when we consider, moreover, how badly all the schools are provided with books, maps and necessary apparatus, we shall comprehend in some degree, the insufficiency of the means provided for the religious education of our poor. The reports of our inspectors show, that those districts, which have been the most disorderly and rebellious are universally those where the grossest ignorance prevails.*

In assembling masses of workmen, there are always two special dangers; a low state of intellect, occasioning improvidence, and an absence of religious feeling, producing immorality and insubordination. It is possible to avoid the danger caused by the improvidence of the poor, by a high intellectual culture; whilst, at the same time, from want of the restraining principle of religion, the dangers arising from turbulence and immorality may be left to increase. And so vice versâ, by the influence

* See the extracts given in the third chapter.

of a religion capable of captivating an uneducated people by its exterior forms and ceremonies, the dangers resulting from disaffection may be avoided, whilst those springing from improvidence are left to augment. But in our country we have neither restraint. Our operatives and agricultural labourers are wholly uneducated, and the forms of our religion are essentially unfitted to influence an uneducated people. The Romish forms of worship exert an empire over the minds of the ignorant, by their imposing observances, but the cold exterior of Protestantism repels all but the intelligent worshipper. Hence it happens, that in our towns and in all our manufacturing and mining districts, the poor are almost without religion. They are neither to be found in Churches nor Chapels. To bring them there, we must either educate them or else introduce the pageantry and spectacles of the Roman Catholic worship; and as the latter is neither desirable nor practicable, how does it behove us all to join in effecting the former? To leave them as at present to multiply, without anything beyond a mere pretence of education, conducted by poor, illiterate and untrained teachers, unwatched, ill paid and most indifferently assisted, and at the same time to stimulate the already overgrown masses of this country, is a blindness, which would be inconceivable in any of the ordinary affairs of life. If Government is not prepared, despite all factions or sectarian opposition, to give a religious education to the people, nothing can justify its having suffered our manufacturing system to grow to its present dimensions, still less its preparing as at present to develop it still further. And let it not be answered, that Government has, in some degree, made preparation for the education of the operatives, by preventing children

attending the mills, until they are eight years of age, and by requiring them to attend schools. What is the character of the Schools? In very many cases so poor, and so bad, that they do much more harm than good. What more important and more difficult task is there, than that of a schoolmaster, and yet what office in the country is supposed to require so little preparation? Any one has been thought fit for it, and the consequence is, that the great majority of those schools, which are not mere dame schools, are conducted by men, who, so far from knowing how to give a religious education, are often hardly capable of teaching the merest rudiments of secular knowledge. Is it not a striking commentary on the comparative interest felt by the English and by foreigners in the religious education of the people, that while in the poor country of Switzerland, with only 2,300,000 inhabitants, there are THIRTEEN large and very complete Normal Establishments, for the education of the Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses of the schools of all the different sects; in the whole of Lancashire and Yorkshire with their 3,258,534 inhabitants, there is only ONE small Normal School, and that ONE only open to Masters belonging to the Established Church! In very truth we are wholly unprepared for the present and the future of those districts. The accumulation of our masses and the increase in the number of towns is no evil in itself, but rather a benefit, inasmuch as it offers extraordinary facilities for the improvement of the people. Civilization can never be so fully developed in the country as in the towns. But to us, this accumulation is an evil fraught with certain danger, so long as we leave its worst influences to operate and so long as we refuse to avail ourselves of the extraordinary opportunities it