perance! We debase ourselves, and invite tyranny to trample upon us!" With one exception these are plain truths. You have it in your power, notwithstanding "the factory hours of labour," to do much. Yes, here are the truths all should attend-to which all must attend or your case will become hopeless. The only wise course for you is, to leave off railing at others, and go seriously to work for yourselves. "God helps those who help themselves," says the proverb; and you may depend upon it that you never will be helped by any but yourselves. If you reason on the matter closely, you will be convinced that you never will be helped by any but yourselves, even if all were disposed to help you, as but few ever will be. Why then, if you are properly disposed to help yourselves, should not the factory hours of working be reduced? In other trades, the workmen refuse to work more than a certain number of hours; and the masters have never been able to make them work more hours than they themselves have decided shall be a day's work. Why do not you do as they have done? A mill cannot go on without spinners; spinners are the best paid, and would, if they were as well organised as other trades are, be just as able as they are to settle the hours of working. Depend upon it you will never have the number of working hours reduced until you yourselves have reduced them. You only waste your time in complaining of your grievances, and in praying for help to Hercules; actions, not prayers, must serve you, or nothing will. Your proposed remedy of a short time-bill, is even more than absurd. It never will be granted. It ought not to be granted. No Parliament will ever pass a bill to prevent any class of manufacturers from carrying on their business in any manner they may think most advantageous, save only so far as relates to the employment of children; and a short time-bill is not necessary for their protection. A short time-bill would make the condition of the "factory workers," beyond all that they have hitherto endured, miserable indeed. You talk wildly of a "power above the worshippers of gold, which shall shake the temple of tyranny to its base, and shew that there is a spirit in Britons, which will not suffer them to see their children thus enslaved." This is calling upon Hercules with a vengeance. You have heard his reply-"get up, you lazy rascals;"-yes, get up; the power is in your own integrity, vigilance, and perseverance; "put your shoulders to the wheel;" help yourselves, and Hercules will help you that is, when you help yourselves-when you want none of his help. I wish I could see your own power in full exercise. It will not be a power from above to "shake the temple of tyranny to its foundations," but the power, the moral power of men, of men here below, who understand their duty to one another, and have wisdom and courage to use it discretely, yet effectually. With respect to the employment of children, I agree with you that it is altogether improper; it is all but atrocious in many cases;-actually atrocious in many of their parents to let them go, and nearly, if not quite, as bad in the legislature to permit the practice. Children are especially under the control of the legislature. The law has declared that they are not free agents, that is, they are not free to choose for themselves. It has forbidden them to make contracts to dispose of themselves; it ought, therefore, to prevent others from disposing of them improperly, and to some extent it has done this. It has left them generally to the care of their parents and guardians, and it is itself the guardian of those who have no "natural guardian." It punishes parents who use them cruelly, and it takes them away from cruel parents; yet it permits them to be sent to factories, where the employment, the discipline, and all the consequences taken together, amount to cruelty much greater than the law will permit the parents to exercise in their own persons. This should be rectified. It might be rectified by a well directed simultaneous effort, and the time would soon arrive when no child under thirteen years of age should be suffered to enter any mill or factory as a labourer; and when admitted, even at that age, the hours of their work should be carefully limited. This step taken, the next as regards minors should be, that no girl should be employed as a labourer or worker in any mill or factory whatIf the legislature should think it was pushing power too far, to prohibit girls being bound apprentices to those employed in mills or factories, after they were fourteen years of age, you, the men, should exclude them, by refusing to work with them. Keep them out, keep them up. Your future happiness depends too greatly on the education of girls from fourteen to twenty-one years of age, for you to allow their education destroyed, and themselves debased in mill and factory work. If, then, the men refused to work in mills and factories with girls, as they ought to do, as other trades have done, in workshops, and for those masters who employ women and girls, the young women who will otherwise be degraded by factory labour will become all that can be desired as companionable wives, and the whole condition of factory-workers would soon be improved, the men will obtain competent wages for their maintenance. This the one will never be, nor the other ever obtain, under the present system. I have never seen the inside of a cotton-factory. It is almost certain that I never shall see the inside of one. I have read all the evidence taken by Committees of Parliament; I have read books and pamphlets; I have conversed with numbers of cottoners, masters as well as men ; I understand much of the machinery used in all sorts of mills, and should like to see it in use. But I cannot voluntarily submit to see the misery of working it before my eyes. I abhor such scenes of degradation as even the best of the cottonmills cannot be free from. This will be treated as a ridiculous feeling as an absurd prejudice; but to me, to whom human beings are valuable as they are intellectual and free, a cotton-mill is more abhorrent than I can find words with which to describe it. Here my good friends is a test of the wisdom and virtue of the factory-workers and the hand-loom weavers ! Here is a reply to some parts of their address, of which they will not probably purchase five hundred copies! If they had the proper feeling, they would re-print it. It contains their own address, as well as the comment thereon. They would make a small subscription, continue it weekly, and circulate a penny pamphlet, say once a fortnight. Here is the opening of a controversy, which, if it were carried on with temper, might lead to almost inexpressible advantage. Yours, my good friend, COMMEMORATION OF THE REFORMATION. THE grand instrument of villainy in England is devotional hypocrisy. No matter what the object in view, a pretence of devotion is deemed, and really is an exceedingly efficient means to attain it. Do you want to fleece the People? do you want to stir up war and hate among your fellow citizens? or do you want to get a good house, and to live at your ease?-put on the mask of devotion. This single instrument will materially serve you in all your purposes. The rogue of every shade and description is now consequently always an amazingly religious person, and the darker his villainy the deeper is the shade of his sanctity. If an idle vagabond hating honest industry, determines to live by begging, he obtains as the first portion of his stock in trade a religious tract, or a hymn book. With one hand he seeks your charity, and with the other brandishes in your face the evidence of his devout and pious character. Does a villain of a far more atrocious description wish to deprive your children of their inheritance, he also assumes a sanctimonious bearing he declaims against the vanities of this life, and under this guise persuades you that he is a model of Christian humility and self-denial. You make him your executor, and he robs your children of their inheritance. The seducer too, now, as the daily papers almost daily testify, puts on the same convenient garb; and under the pretence of seeking the Lord, and by means of fervent devotion, makes serious love to your wife, or perhaps succeeds in dishonouring your daughter. Are we for ever to be thus imposed upon? Shall we never be able to penetrate the thin disguise of the sanctimonious hypocrite, and believe a man to be a villain, even though he have holy words in his mouth? When each succceding day brings us fresh evidence, and bitter experience teaches us to put no truth in devout professions, are we still to go blindly forward, regardless of their striking admonitions, and turn a deaf ear to all the warnings that assail us?-A striking test of the extent of our gullibility is at hand. If in spite of all the many proofs before our eyes of the ease with which rogues assume an appearance of devotion, and of the sort of use to which this assumed devotion is turned, we yet allow ourselves to be carried away by fine professions and hypocritical pretences, and suffer the Orange Tories of Ireland to stir up commotion and civil and religious war under the device of commemorating the Reformation - if we allow this I say, then let no man despair of imposing on the public, no matter how scandalous, how extravagant may be his swindling intentions. Let us endeavour to obtain a correct and distinct conception of the circumstances under which this pious scheme has been propounded, and we shall then be able to appreciate the wisdom of those with whom it originated, and the honesty of that party who desire to turn the notable project to their own sinister and selfish purposes. At this moment something like six millions of the Irish People are of the Roman Catholic Church, and eight hundred thousand of the same People are of what is called the Reformed persuasion: under this general term, be it observed, the Reformed sects differing from each other, as much as they differ from the Catholics. Persons belonging to these Reformed sects, have until the last few years had undisputed sway in Ireland; and an iron despotism was theirs over their brethren of the Catholic Church. Thanks to the increasing knowledge both of the English and the Irish People, this odious despotism has been uprooted. The rage of the faction. thus deprived of their unwholesome power knows no bounds. They are absolutely frantic at their loss and there is no scheme, plan, or device, they will not adopt in the vain and desperate hope of regaining the power of which they have happily been deprived. The division of the Irish People has been up to this time, Catholic and Protestant which terms are synonimous with oppressed and oppressor. Religious discord has been brought and kept in aid of bad Government. In order the better to despoil the People, at large the happy plan was suggested and adopted of dividing them into two grand religious divisions thrusting the mass of the People, that is, the great body who were to be fleeced, into the despised class; and keeping the small portion that were to use the shears and to live by the plunder, within the holy circle of orthodoxy. Protestant came thus to mean-Aristocrat and oppressor; Catholic, the People, the oppressed. In England happily the fury, the madness of this religious hate is unknown; and as a nation we are unable to sympathise with the despoiling Protestants of Ireland, though we be of the same creed. So soon then as the influence of the People of England was felt in Ireland, a Reform commencedReligious persecution began to cease, and peace and good will began to take place of hate and commotion. Every. thing is gradually tending to this desirable result-religious discord is beginning to die away, and good Government for Ireland is what we in our lives hope to see accomplished. Just as the embers of this war began to die out just as the flame had been extinguished-just as peace was beginning-certain holy and pious persons, utterly careless of the circumstances in which this unhappy country is placed, looking not to the right hand or the left, not asking whether true religion enjoined peace and not confusion, choose to propose to the People the celebration of a division which took place among Christian brethren three hundred years ago. This division was into Protestant and Catholic, and they call upon us in the midst of distractions such as I have just described, to celebrate the triumphs of Protestantism. In the midst of Ireland, among six millions of Catholics, an insulting festival is proposed, in or der, I presume, to make the Catholics believe that Protestants are humble, peaceful, and forbearing. These godly persons have a strange way of conciliating good will and promoting peace. A People, who for centuries have been scourged under the name and authority of Protestants; who, because they were Catholics, have been plundered and ground to the earth, are now, under pretence of a devotional festival, to be taunted with the 'errors of their faith, and with the evil deeds of those who, three hundred years ago, believed in this faith; to be insulted by the pompous celebration of an event, which they deem a calamity, and, in no measured language, to be consigned to perdition because of the stubborness of their belief. This is what will be done by the commemoration of the division which took place among Christian brethren three hundred years ago. I well know the pretences by which it is sought to evade the conclusion to which I have come. It is said, that mankind were freed at that time from a pernicious thraldom, that immeasurable good resulted to the world from the Reformation, and that we cannot do better than testify our gratitude for so great a deliverance. The first answer to this statement is, that such a celebration might be very proper, if men were all of one mind con cerning the event. That if the whole nation were Protestant-if the división between Catholic and Protestant no longer subsisted-if no heats, heartburning dissensions, and commotions, could arise from it-then such a festival would be harmless. But when the contrary is notoriously the case, when such a festival would be deemed an insult by a large and suffering portion of the People, that which would be harmless in the case above supposed, becomes not merely dangerous but criminal-criminal in every point of view; whether we look upon it simply as affecting the peace of society, or the proper and religious tone and temper of their minds. Such a festival will now promote hate, and perhaps civil war. It will serve to strengthen the hands of those who have used power only to oppress the People; will promote bigotry, and incite to persecution. It is not enough for any man to say, I do not intend this. It behoves us, when we act, to learn the effect of our acts, not merely as regards ourselves, but others. The originators of this scheme might have had no evil intent; but so a madman might say, who throws a lighted match into a magazine of powder, or into a stack of corn. He did not intend the explosion; no-he did not intend it, but he has produced it; and the effect is the same as if the evil intent reigned in his mind when he acted. If the man who should throw a lighted match into a stack of corn were not mad, he would be hanged, no matter what might be his intent: his neglect-his utter carelessness-being just as culpable as the most nefarious intentions. So of the pious proposers of this incendiary scheme: their carelessness and neglect make them as culpable as if they distinctly had desired disturbance. They shall not cloak the evil with the garb of sanctity. Their devotion, if it take this turn, is as mischievous as impiety; and on their heads be all the mischief that may result from this nefarious device. Let us, however, penetrate a little deeper, and learn what is the actual state of mind which has led to the desire of celebrating this event. Is not vanity at the bottom of it? Is there not lurking in some of these pious hearts a vain-glorious feeling of superiority? And above all, is there not immeasurable presumption there? "We are right," say these selfglorifying folk" we are in the right path -but ye blind and perverse generation of Catholics, ye are utterly in error, and are going straightway to destruction. As we are assured that we are without blemish in our belief, we are not content with the eternal benefits which we suppose result therefrom; but we wish for a little earthly glory in consequence of our lucky superiority. It is true it is written that we are not to exalt ourselves, lest we be abased; we will, however, in this case, run the risk, as it is a pious exaltation. A little self-gratulation is permissible in so exceedingly good a cause." Is there nothing of this sort thought, if not said, by the proposers of this festival? If they were really influenced by gratitude towards God, for having led their forefathers out of error, could they not testify this gratitude by quiet and silent thanksgiving? Need they spread dismay and confusion among their brethren because they are joyful? Need they be mischievous, in order to prove themselves grateful? In my humble judgment, the most appropriate testimony in such a case would be the inward devotion of a truly pious and thankful spirit-a quiet thankfulness, a retiring and modest joy, and steadfast determination to assume no merit, while we sought to be grateful for our deliverance from error. A spirit which sought to give this testimony would do its labour in secret-would not proclaim upon the high places its satisfaction, but in the inmost chamber of the house offer up its thanksgivings to God. How different is the vain-glorious proceed |