preaching at Exeter on behalf of the Devonshire hospitals, expressed his belief that the annual loss to the workpeople engaged in the woollen manufacture, the cotton trade, the bricklaying and building trade, by Idle Monday, amounted to over seven millions sterling.  If man’s chief end were to manufacture cloth, silk, cotton, hardware, toys, and china; to buy in the cheapest market, and to sell in the dearest; to cultivate land, grow corn, and graze cattle; to live for mere money profit, and hoard or spend, as the case might be, we might then congratulate ourselves upon our National Prosperity.  But is this the chief end of man?  Has he not faculties, affections, and sympathies, besides muscular organs?  Has not his mind and heart certain claims, as well as his mouth and his back?  Has he not a soul as well as a stomach?  And ought not “prosperity” to include the improvement and well-being of his morals and intellect as well as of his bones and muscles?

Mere money is no indication of prosperity.  A man’s nature may remain the same.  It may even grow more stunted and deformed, while he is doubling his expenditure, or adding cent, per cent, to his hoards yearly.  It is the same with the mass.  The increase of their gains may merely furnish them with increased means for gratifying animal indulgences, unless their moral character keeps pace with their physical advancement.  Double the gains of an uneducated, overworked man, in a time of prosperity, and what is the result?  Simply that you have furnished him with the means of eating and drinking more!  Thus, not even the material well-being of the population is secured by that condition of things which is defined by political economists as “National Prosperity.”  And so long as the moral elements of the question are ignored, this kind of “prosperity” is, we believe, calculated to produce far more mischievous results than good.  It is knowledge and virtue alone that can confer dignity on a man’s life; and the growth of such qualities in a nation are the only true marks of its real prosperity; not the infinite manufacture and sale of cotton prints, toys, hardware, and crockery.  The Bishop of Manchester, when preaching at a harvest thanksgiving near Preston, referred to a letter which he had received from a clergyman in the south of England, who, after expressing his pleasure at the fact that the agricultural labourers were receiving higher wages, lamented “that at present the only result he could discover from their higher wages was that a great deal more beer was consumed.  If this was the use we were making of this prosperity, we could hardly call it a blessing for which we had a right or ground to thank God.  The true prosperity of the nation consisted not so much in the fact that the nation was growing in wealth—­though wealth was a necessary attribute of prosperity—­but that it was growing in virtue; and that there was a more equable distribution of comfort, contentment, and the things of this lower world.”