soon becomes satiated with any
subject. Some foreign war, or political contest, may all at once turn
its looks in far other directions. But the social remedies that we have
been talking of, are not things to be finished by a single stroke. We
cannot expect to complete them just while the daylight of public opinion
is with us. The evil to be struggled against is a thing entwined with
every fibre of the body politic. It is enough to occupy the whole mind
of the age; and demands the best energies of the best minds. It should
be a "Thirty years' war" against sloth and neglect. It requires men who
will persevere through public favour or disfavour, who can subdue their
own fastidiousness, be indifferent to ingratitude, tolerant of folly, who
can endure the extreme vexation of seeing their most highly prized
endeavours thwarted by well intentioned friends, and who are not
dependent for reward upon those things which are addressed to vanity or
to ambition.

* * * * *

After a long fit of distress which, for the poorer classes, may almost be
called a seven years' famine, we are now apparently entering upon one of
our periodic times of prosperity. You hear of thousands of additional
"hands" being wanted, of new mills rising up, and at last of a revival of
the home trade. It is one of those "breathing spaces" in which we can
look back with less despondency, and forward with some deliberation.
Each man's apprehensions for his own fortunes need no longer absorb his
whole attention. Yet one cannot observe all this clashing and whizzing
of machinery, this crowding on our quays, this contention of railway
projects, and the general life and hum of renewed activity, without a
profound fear and sadness lest such things should pass on, as their
predecessors have passed, leaving only an increased bulk of unhandy
materials to be dealt with. It is one of those periods upon which the
historian, armed with all that wisdom which a knowledge of the result can
furnish him, may thus dilate in measured sentences. "A time of nearly
seven years of steady distress had now elapsed; nor can it be said, that
this distress had been lightly regarded by thoughtful minds, or that its
salutary process had not commenced. The question of the condition of the
labouring classes had in a measure become prominent. The Essayist
moralized about it after his fashion; the lover of statistics arrayed his
fearful lists of fig