ches are sent to the pawnshop,
whilst deplorable appeals are made to the charitable, and numerous
families are cast upon the poor-rates.

This habitual improvidence--though of course there are many admirable
exceptions--is the real cause of the social degradation of the artizan.
This too is the prolific source of social misery. But the misery is
entirely the result of human ignorance and self-indulgence. For though
the Creator has ordained poverty, the poor are not necessarily, nor as a
matter of fact, the miserable. Misery is the result of moral
causes,--most commonly of individual vice and improvidence.

The Rev. Mr. Norris, in speaking of the habits of the highly paid miners
and iron-workers of South Staffordshire, says, "Improvidence is too tame
a word for it--it is recklessness; here young and old, married and
unmarried, are uniformly and almost avowedly self-indulgent
spendthrifts. One sees this reckless character marring and vitiating the
nobler traits of their nature. Their gallantry in the face of danger is
akin to foolhardiness; their power of intense labour is seldom exerted
except to compensate for time lost in idleness and revelry; their
readiness to make 'gatherings' for their sick and married comrades seems
only to obviate the necessity of previous saving; their very creed--and,
after their sort, they are a curiously devotional people, holding
frequent prayer-meetings in the pits--often degenerates into fanatical
fatalism. But it is seen far more painfully and unmistakably in the
alternate plethora and destitution between which, from year's end to
year's end, the whole population seems to oscillate. The prodigal
revelry of the _reckoning night_, the drunkenness of Sunday, the refusal
to work on Monday and perhaps Tuesday, and then the untidiness of their
home towards the latter part of the two or three weeks which intervene
before the next pay-day; their children kept from school, their wives
and daughters on the pit-bank, their furniture in the pawnshop; the
crowded and miry lanes in which they live, their houses often cracked
from top to bottom by the 'crowning in' of the ground, without drainage,
or ventilation, or due supply of water;--such a state of things as this,
co-existing with earnings which might ensure comfort and even
prosperity, seems to prove that no legislation can cure the evil."

We have certainly had numerous "Reforms." We have had household
suffrage, and vote by ballot. We have reli