ison goes on to
say, "Saving is within the reach of nearly every man, even if quite at
the bottom of the tree; but if it were of anything like _common_
occurrence, the destitution and disease of this city would be kept
within quite manageable limits. And this will take place. I may not live
to see it, but it will be within two generations. For, unfortunately,
this amount of change may be effected without the least improvement in
the spiritual condition of the people. Good laws, energetically
enforced, with compulsory education, supplemented by gratuitous
individual exertion (which will then have a much reduced field and much
fairer prospects), will certainly succeed in giving the mass of the
people so much light as will generally guide them into so much industry
and morality as is clearly conducive to their bodily ease and
advancement in life."

The difference in thriftiness between the English workpeople and the
inhabitants of Guernsey is thus referred to by Mr. Denison: "The
difference between poverty and pauperism is brought home to us very
strongly by what I see here. In England, we have people faring
sumptuously while they are getting good wages, and coming on the parish
paupers the moment those wages are suspended. Here, people are never
dependent upon any support but their own; but they live, of their own
free will, in a style of frugality which a landlord would be hooted at
for suggesting to his cottagers. We pity Hodge, reduced to bacon and
greens, and to meat only once a week. The principal meal of a Guernsey
farmer consists of _soupe a la graisse_, which is, being interpreted,
cabbage and peas stewed with a little dripping. This is the daily dinner
of men who _own_ perhaps three or four cows, a pig or two, and poultry.
But the produce and the flesh of these creatures they sell in the
market, investing their gains in extension of land, or stock, or in
"quarters," that is, rent-charges on land, certificates of which are
readily bought and sold in the market."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Letters and other writings of the late Edward Denison,
M.P._, pp. 141, 142.]

Mr. Dension died before he could accomplish much. He was only able to
make a beginning. The misery, arising from improvidence, which he so
deeply deplored, still exists, and is even more widely spread. It is not
merely the artizan who spends all that he earns, but the classes above
him, who cannot plead the same excuse of ignorance. Many of what are
called t