unmarried, are uniformly and almost avowedly self-indulgent
spendthrifts. One sees this reckless character marring and vitiating the
nobler traits of their nature. Their gallantry in the face of danger is
akin to foolhardiness; their power of intense labour is seldom exerted
except to compensate for time lost in idleness and revelry; their
readiness to make 'gatherings' for their sick and married comrades seems
only to obviate the necessity of previous saving; their very creed--and,
after their sort, they are a curiously devotional people, holding
frequent prayer-meetings in the pits--often degenerates into fanatical
fatalism. But it is seen far more painfully and unmistakably in the
alternate plethora and destitution between which, from year's end to
year's end, the whole population seems to oscillate. The prodigal
revelry of the _reckoning night_, the drunkenness of Sunday, the refusal
to work on Monday and perhaps Tuesday, and then the untidiness of their
home towards the latter part of the two or three weeks which intervene
before the next pay-day; their children kept from school, their wives
and daughters on the pit-bank, their furniture in the pawnshop; the
crowded and miry lanes in which they live, their houses often cracked
from top to bottom by the 'crowning in' of the ground, without drainage,
or ventilation, or due supply of water;--such a state of things as this,
co-existing with earnings which might ensure comfort and even
prosperity, seems to prove that no legislation can cure the evil."

We have certainly had numerous "Reforms." We have had household
suffrage, and vote by ballot. We have relieved the working classes of
the taxes on corn, cattle, coffee, sugar, and provisions generally; and
imposed a considerable proportion of the taxes from which they have been
relieved on the middle and upper ranks. Yet these measures have produced
but little improvement in the condition of the working people. They have
not applied the principle of Reform to themselves. They have not begun