the spiritual condition of the people. Good laws, energetically
enforced, with compulsory education, supplemented by gratuitous
individual exertion (which will then have a much reduced field and much
fairer prospects), will certainly succeed in giving the mass of the
people so much light as will generally guide them into so much industry
and morality as is clearly conducive to their bodily ease and
advancement in life."

The difference in thriftiness between the English workpeople and the
inhabitants of Guernsey is thus referred to by Mr. Denison: "The
difference between poverty and pauperism is brought home to us very
strongly by what I see here. In England, we have people faring
sumptuously while they are getting good wages, and coming on the parish
paupers the moment those wages are suspended. Here, people are never
dependent upon any support but their own; but they live, of their own
free will, in a style of frugality 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 à 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