the Reformed Poor Law, consider that twenty-one ounces of food daily ’is more than the hard working labourer with a family could accomplish for himself by his own exertions.’  This, observes a writer in the Times, being the Commissioners’ reading of their own ‘standard,’ it may be considered superfluous to refer to any other authority; but, as the Royal Agricultural Society of England have clubbed their general information on this subject in a compilation from a selection of essays submitted to them, we are bound to refer to such witnesses who give the most precise information on the actual condition of the independent labourer, with minute instructions for his general guidance, and the economical expenditure of his income.  ‘He should,’ they say, ‘toil early and late’ to make himself ‘perfect’ in his calling.  ’He should pinch and screw the family, even in the commonest necessaries,’ until he gets ‘a week’s wages to the fore.’  He should drink in his work ‘water mixed with some powdered ginger,’ which warms the stomach, and is ‘extremely cheap.’  He should remember that ’from three to four pounds of potatoes are equal in point of nourishment to a pound of the best wheaten bread, besides having the great advantage of filling the stomach.  He is told that ’a lot of bones may always be got from the butchers for 2d., and they are never scraped so clean as not to have some scraps of meat adhering to them.’  He is instructed to boil these two penny worth of bones, for the first day’s family dinner, until the liquor ‘tastes something like broth.’  For the second day, the bones are to be again boiled in the same manner, but for a longer time.  Nor is this all, they say, ’that the bones, if again boiled for a still longer time, will once more yield a nourishing broth, which may be made into pea soup.’

This is the system and this the schoolmastership expressly sanctioned by the Bishops of London and Chester.  In piety nevertheless these prelates are not found wanting.  They may starve the bodies but no one can charge them with neglecting the souls of our ‘independent labourers.’  Nothing can exceed their anxiety to feed and clothe the spiritually destitute.  They raise their mitred fronts, even in palaces, to proclaim and lament over the spiritual destitution which so extensively prevails—­but they seldom condescend to notice physical destitution.  When the cry of famine rings throughout the land they coolly recommend rapid church extension, thus literally offering stone to those who ask them for bread.  To get the substantial and give the spiritual is their practical Christianity.  To spiritualise the poor into contentment with the ‘nourishing broth’ from thrice boiled bones, and to die of hunger rather than demand relief, are their darling objects.  Verily, if these and men like these do not grind the faces of the poor, the Author of this Apology is unable to conceive in what that peculiar process consists.