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 the “upper” classes are no more excusable than the “lower.”  They waste their means on keeping up appearances, and in feeding folly, dissipation, and vice.

No one can reproach the English workman with want of industry.  He works harder and more skilfully than the workman of any other country; and he might be more comfortable and independent in his circumstances, were he as prudent as he is laborious.  But improvidence is unhappily the defect of the class.  Even the best-paid English workmen, though earning more money than the average of professional men, still for the most part belong to the poorer classes because of their thoughtlessness.  In prosperous times they are not accustomed to make provision for adverse times; and when a period of social pressure occurs, they are rarely found more than a few weeks ahead of positive want.

Hence, the skilled workman, unless trained in good habits, may exhibit no higher a life than that of the mere animal; and the earning of increased wages will only furnish him with increased means for indulging in the gratification of his grosser appetites.  Mr. Chadwick says, that during the Cotton Famine, “families trooped into the relief rooms in the most abject condition, whose previous aggregate wages exceeded the income of many curates,—­as had the wages of many of the individual workmen."[1] In a time of prosperity, working-people feast, and in a time of adversity they “clem.”  Their earnings, to use their own phrase, “come in at the spigot and go out at the bunghole.”  When prosperity comes to an end, and they are paid off, they rely upon chance and providence—­the providence of the Improvident!

[Footnote 1:  Address on Economy and Trade. By EDWIN CHADWICK, C.B., p. 22.]