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ments these which highly eulogized travellers confirm to us on their own authority. One of these, speaking of the same region, says, "where there are no idlers, and, more than all, no poor!" infected, however, with the philosophic dread of population, they anticipate when the means of carrying off a superfluous population must fail, and then comes pauperism with all its train of evils. "The principle,” therefore, will not let them rest: they are alarmed for futurity; population, seen in embryo, haunts them perpetually, like Gay's ghost of an unborn child, which appeared to frighten its guilty father into timely reparation.

"

All this would be very amusing, were it not for the mischief such false statements inflict upon those who credit them. A correspondent in the Edinburgh Magazine complains bitterly of being deceived into this opinion. “A late writer," says he, "in the "A Edinburgh Review, says we have no poor rates. I wish he was correct. My poor rates, last year, amounted to ten dollars; although this township and the adjoining one have a workhouse with a farm of two hundred acres, and more, for the employment and support of the paupers. This, considering the high rate of wages, the cheapness of food, and full employment for every one, is more, in proportion, than any poor rates in England. There are sometimes from twelve to fifteen hundred persons in the workhouse in Philadelphia, and as many in that of New York. They cost, in Philadelphia, 100,000 dollars per annum,

'The Hon. F. de Roos, Personal Narrative of Travels in the United States, p. 24.

P

and the whole system is miserably conducted'." That this statement is correct there is not the least reason to doubt. I copy the following paragraph from an American paper, and it relates to the very period. "The cost of supporting the poor, in Philadelphia, has been diminished to that extent, that we understand it is in contemplation to reduce the annual assessment from 120,000 dollars to 90,0002." In the somewhat larger city of New York, the annual expenses of maintaining the poor, we learn on the decisive testimony of Dr. Dwight, amounted, in the year 1811, to 154,388 dollars, 88 cents': that there were 2,814 paupers admitted into the alms-house, from the 1st of April, 1822, to the 1st of April, 1813; of whom there were remaining, at the latter date, 1,265 persons. Nor were these extraordinary years; on the contrary, the number of the poor has since greatly increased: we learn from Bristed, that a memorial addressed to the state legislature, in the month of March, 1817, stated, "that, during last winter, fifteen thousand paupers, that is to say, about a seventh of our whole population received alms "." He too takes up the European notion, that poor-laws ought to be abolished, and pauperism cured by being abandoned. In addition to this, it appears there are, of humane and charitable societies in that city, forty in number, which are supported with spirit. The expense of one of

요

'Edinburgh Magazine, Letter dated May, 1825, p. 543.

• Philadelphia Gazette, Dec. 3, 1825.

Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, vol. iii. • Ibid. p. 437.

pp. 455, 456.

5

Bristed, America and her Resources, p. 288.

these, in 1816, is stated, by Warden, to have amounted to 39,053 dollars'. It needs not be added, that, in the other city just mentioned, Philadelphia, as well as in all others throughout the Union, similar institutions, to the high honour of the country, are established. But our traveller says, of America, "above all, there are no poor!"..

Let it not be supposed, that this provision for the poor only became needful, or the burden it imposed heavy, as the population enlarged. Such, indeed, are the notions of our theorists, but nothing can be further from the fact than either. Only a short time after the settlers numbered only 21,200 souls, according to Mr. Malthus, Sir Joshua Child wrote his Discourses on Trade; in which able work he distinguished New England as legally providing for its poor3. A quarter of a century after this, we still find that "the inhabitants had to meet once a month, sometimes every week, for relief of the poor." In the other states, likewise, we know that there was early a settled provision made for them: in Virginia, for instance; and the pressure their maintenance occasioned was proportionably the heaviest, when the population was the smallest. Thus in 1742, when Boston contained 1719 houses, and not many more than 16,000 inhabitants, there were 1000 poor widows; 111 persons in the alms-house, and 36 in the work

1 Warden, Statistical, &c. Account of the United States, vol. i. p. 535.

2

Essay, p. 338.

3

Child, Discourse on Trade, p. 88. A Narrative of the Miseries of New England, Complete Collection of Papers relating to the Revolution, p. 30.

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History of Virginia, by a Native, part iii. p. 40 (1705).

house'. I shall close these hasty collections on the subject with the authority of Dr. Dwight. "Our laws," says that excellent writer, "provide effectually for the comfortable maintenance of all the poor, who are inhabitants, and so long as they reside with us; of poor strangers, in whatsoever country they were born; and, when they are sick, supply them with physicians, nurses, and attendants. The children of the poor are furnished with education, and apprenticed at the public expense. There is not a country upon earth, where the provision for the wants and sufferings of the poor is so effectual as New England"."

Thus it is that the poor amongst our transatlantic brethren are cared for-the poor of all countries, complexions, and conditions: not on the cheap wordy plan, now so much recommended, the "be thou warmed, be thou clothed" system; but at an expense which, considering all the circumstances of the country, is truly astonishing: and yet our reviews, and magazines, and books, our political economists and legislators, are perpetually appealing from the operation of our own national provision, to America! It is the most charitable construction that can possibly be put upon such conduct, to believe that they know nothing whatsoever on the subjects on which they express themselves the most confidently;—“ this is the way of them."

(12.) But the force of this appeal may probably be thus evaded:-the provision for the poor in America, it may be said, is the relic of the ignorance and

'Holmes, American Annals, vol. ii. p. 136.

* Dwight, Travels in America, vol. iv. p. 326.

ages

prejudice they have inherited from their forefathers of England; and consequently the operation of the more enlightened system must not, after all, be sought for there. Be it so. There is a country, and one sufficiently near; great in extent and certainly not overburdened with population; vast in its means and fortunate in its position; in which the experiment might be tried with advantage; and there it has been tried: I mean France. We have heard much of her having been a political beacon; she has been yet more, a móral one. When she had trampled upon the rights of property, public and private, and revelled in the spoliation, had put down her sacred institutions, and filled the land with dismay and suffering, she seized upon the sacred funds which the piety of preceding had accumulated in behalf of suffering humanity, and swept away the "right of the poor." A man can have little faith in revelation, nor yet in a GOD, who does not believe that the anger of Heaven would kindle at such a heinous spoliation of the defenceless; and he must shut his eyes to past events not to see its tremendous manifestations. But not to allude to the moral character of the transaction any further, let us examine its policy. After having seised their funds, the Comité de Mendicité recommended no other mode of provision. The system of our regular and systematic relief was, and Mr. Malthus says “justly, stated by the French to be la plaie politique de l'Angleterre la plus dévorante'," (England's most devouring political sore). He repeats, elsewhere, his admiration of their wise and proper conduct: "the 'Malthus, Essay on Population, p. 536.