vation, and abridged of their fair proportion of enjoyment and of life, are not even casually glanced at ; and while he exults with pride and pleasure over wealth, which is the work of man, man himself, the work of God, is regarded as the mere tool, fit only to be worn out upon the production of wealth, which is carefully stored in well-appointed warehouses, while the wealthproducers are cast at random on the waste of chance charity, or churlishly admitted to ill-constructed workhouses. The division of labour, and all the other principles of the science of political economy, have aimed at the increase of wealth, and the aim has been accomplished; but the practical morality, that ought to make a primary part of this and every science, is left out of view. Where have we plan or principle for the increase or security of happiness, though to seek happiness be the inherent and inextinguishable master-motive of every human breast-leading naturally to the exercise of every virtue, but under existing circumstances to every vice? God is continually replenishing the world with beings endowed for enjoyment, and animated by the desire to obtain it; while man is multiplying circumstances that place all the qualifications and cravings under an impious interdiction. The love of property produced the fratricidal law of primogeniture, which parts those whom God had joined, bids brother stand opposed to brother, and, by creating discord and division in families, brings the severest curse of life upon them. I knew three sisters, co-heiresses to a not very considerable property: even in their very childhood, I have heard those girls deprecate the event of their having a brother, because said they, "He would take ALL." Here is an evidence of the preference of dead dross to living love; the consequences flowing from such preference may easily be calculated. Children are essentially better legislators than men. I never knew a question as to the division of any thing put to children, that they did not promptly decide upon an equal division; justice is obvious, and their fresh minds, immediately perceive it, unless where they have been corrupted by a system of preference and injustice adopted towards themselves. I remember hearing a woman say to some children, regarding the crumbs of a plump-cake which they had been eating, "It was Harriet's cake, so she ought to have the crumb." It is this audit interference that makes the crumbs of charity so scanty, that even the permission to pick them up from under the rich man's table is accorded as a boon, and received as a privilege. The love of property has produced every where a system of plunder, which actuates alike the governing and the governed, till society has become little else than a habit of polite pillage, carried on with bows, and curtseys, and counterfeit complacency. As soon as the secret of making wealth became known, Appropriation, like a sordid step-mother, appeared; she accumulated into masses that which ought to have been diffused like the fertilizing dew and the invigorating sun-shine. Partiality she made her prime minister, by whom favourites have been elected, and they get much for doing nothing, at the expense of those who get next to nothing for doing a great deal. Society is divided into the idle and the industrious; alas there is a division yet more invidious,-those who enjoy every thing and do nothing, and those who want every thing, even the work which they would willingly do to keep life and soul together; to be willing and able to work is now not enough: the mere privilege to labour must be purchased by interest and favour. Sloth and superabundance have made the former class wanton: exercise and necessity have made the latter ingenious: the one has contracted a vicious appetite for variety: the other exists under an unfortunate obligation to administer to that appetite. Labour and invention, from the honourable office of supplying the necessaries, comforts, and embellishments of life, are debased to the task of devising luxuries and emblazonments. Trinkets for the vain, toys for the weak, and things yet worse for the vile, degraded industry is compelled to produce, or be quite starved, as it is now half starved. An insane waste of the best powers of one portion of the human kind is made to create and keep alive the worst propensities of another portion of the same species. There is in all things an equitable re-action ever in operation, and injustice on one side makes injury contingent on the other; thus the debasement of the poor re-acts to the degradation of the rich. The pale victim of unhealthy trade, (a crying evil, which, when men feel and think properly, will cease to exist; for there is no real necessity of such trades-they are ever in the pay of some of the artificial wants of enervating luxury,)—the pale victim of an unhealthy trade labours for some pale victim of indulgence, the toiler is surrounded by children squalid and listless, or desperate and vicious through want; the idler by children feeble and effeminate, or, perhaps, equally desperate and vicious through excess. home of the one every feeling and faculty is stunted or stimulated, paralysed or provoked, according to the strength with which nature has furnished its inmates to endure or defy the injuries of fortune; in the home of the other all is abundance, or rather super-abundance with all the toys and contrivances which supersede the exercise of intellect, disturb judgment, distract attention, excite the passions-in fact, with all the moral impoverishment that excess of money often produces. In the The young victims of want, and the young victims of wealth, alike, at their destined hour, swarm into the fields of life. There they necessarily encounter each other; they are naturally brethren, but political foes, and conflict is the consequence, sometimes open, oftener covert. Their pursuits are severally, it might be said mutually pleasure and pillage-for these are frequently convertible terms-the pleasures of the libertine and the gambler surely deserve no better name than the pillage of the pander and the pickpocket. Deceit and credulity, artifice and indolence, are all upon the scene ; and the strange transitions inevitably attendant on such a state of things (which, under the denomination of "the hope of rising, and the fear of falling," is held to be so admirable) necessarily occur. The poor man's son springs, by some means or other, into wealth, and power; the rich man's son sinks into want and infamy. For the civil war of life the former is often better educated than the latter; is frequently possessed of energies unknown to the supine inheritor of fortune. The pupil of poverty has often craft, where the disciple of wealth has only credulity, and credulity of the worst kind-that of erroneously believing himself to be a very superior creature. Thus the one will be subtle and servile, where the other will be vain haughty. The first fights for all that makes life desirable; the second only seeks something to render it endurable; the one is starving, the other surfeited; the one is fierce and self dependent, the other effeminate and dependent on the services of others. What, in the long run; as is familiarly said, must be the issue of such arrangements? That which exists-wretchedness. The rich are almost as remote from happiness as the poor;-for where there is uncertainty there must be fear and solicitude; and where they are, happiness cannot be. Luxury and misery have now, it might be imagined, reached their extreme points, and St. James's and St. Giles's are as complete antipodes as it is possible for them to be; but the universal impression made by these revolting and unnecessary contrasts bears a new charac. ter from one important circumstance, which is, the general disposition to look into the constituents of human nature-the general disposition to perceive that physical wants, moral affections, and mental capacity, have equal claims to satisfaction, enjoyment, and exercise in every class; and that, as regards these, if there be not, and perhaps never will be, the equality which an extreme philantrophy proclaims, there is no such inequality as conventional rule pretends. Men are now weighed by another standard than they were of old, when the husbandman and the artizan were held to be, by divine decree, little better than beasts of burthen, and monarchs and nobles were deemed by divine right, something more than demi-gods. The slow but sure progress of time has accumulated evidence that strikes even purblind prejudice. When the observer looks around for beauty, where does he find it? Only among the privi leged in courts and cities? Does the anatomist perceive a fine organization to be exclusively confined to the wealthier classes? Does the moralist discover the virtues and affections only in circles and homes of opulence? No, no. However long the present gross and unequal division of the goods of life may continue, they will never again be held as right or necessary, The people are rising in the moral scale, and, to preserve any thing like the ancient order of things, their conventional superiors must rise in proportion; but they have too long been satisfied with a fictitious elevation to have much power or disposition to attempt taking a real one; and if they did, as nature, when given fair play, is no respecter of persons, they could not secure being the fleetest in the race or the strongest in the battle. Also vain, weak, and fatal, will be all attempts to repress those who are resolved to rise-as the weight of pressure, so will be the force of resistance; and woe to the instrument of such attempts-the boiler is the first sacrifice to an explosion. The holder of power is too often like an intoxicated man; as insensible of impending danger as reason or justice, he does not see that his own interest consorts with both, and that he had better concede like a relenting brother than be conquered like a reluctant brigand. So inebriated has power become, that it has ceased to make oblations at the shrine of hospitality, which once prompted the wealthy, on occasions, to cast wide the castle gates; people the ancient hall with guests of all degrees, who in the generous revel forgot griefs and forgave injuries. Now absenteeism proclaims the sympathy which the rich and titled entertain for their suffering fellow-country people the former are, perhaps, in the predicament of Curran's aunt, whom he described as holding the petitions of the poor with one hand, wiping her eyes with the other, and not having a third to put into her pocket; of course, the objects of her commiseration went unrelieved. Printing, the great agent of the diffusion of knowledge, has truly been the poor man's friend; it has come on like a steam vessel, running down all the petty craft that opposed its way. But there is a power greater than this, of which this is only one of the engines; that power is education. Education is the only equalizer as far as human kind can be equalified, THAT will do it. It is a universal interest-let it be a universal aim.-Monthly Repository. STANZAS. "THEY tell us of an Indian shore. Where gold is wash'd by every wave; Where neither winds nor breakers roar, To mar the peace which plenty gave. But breathes there in that land of gold One spirit of the rarer mould? "They tell us of an Indian vale, Where Summer breathes on every tree; Where odours float on every gale, And grass is green continually. "They tell us of an Indian sun. Which overpowers the shrinking sense; And bursting through the vapour dun,' Dispel's the winter's influence. I care not for that Indian sun, It beams before my fancy now; I'd smooth the wrinkles from my brow, I'd smile at Nature's fiercest moodWith one to cheer my solitude." THE FEVER SHIP. I SAILED from Liverpool for Jamaica, and after a pleasant voyage arrived at my destination, and discharged my cargo. My vessel was called the Lively Charlotte, a tight brig, well found for trading, and navigated by thirteen hands. I re-loaded with sugar and rum for Halifax, intending to freight from that place for England before the setting in of winter. This object I could only achieve by using double diligence, allowing a reasonable time for accidental obstacles. My brig was built sharp for sailing fast, and I did not trouble myself about convoy, (it was during war,) as I could run a fair race with a common privateer, and we trusted to manœuvring, four heavy carronades, and a formidable show of painted ports and quakers, for escaping capture by any enemy not posfessing such an overwhelming superiority of force as would give him confidence to run boldly close alongside, and find out what were really our means of defence. I speedily shipped what provisions and necessaries I wanted, and set sail. A breeze scarcely sufficient to fill the canvas, carried us out of Port Royal harbour. The weather was insufferably hot; the air seemed full of fire, and the redness of the hemisphere, not long before sunset, glared as intensely as the flame of a burning city. Jamaica was very sickly; the yellow fever had destroyed numbers of the inhabitants, and three fourths of all I new-comers speedily became its victims. I had been fortunate enough to lose only two men during my stay of three or four weeks (Jack Wilson and Tom Waring), but they were the two most sturdy and healthy seamen in the brig: the first died in thirty-nine hours after he was attacked, and the second on the fourth day. Two hands besides were ill when we left, which reduced to nine the number capable of performing duty. imagined that putting to sea was the best plan I could adopt to afford the sick a chance of recovery, and retard the spreading of the disorder among such as remained in health. But I was deceived. I carried the contagion with me; and on the evening of the day on which we lost sight of land, another hand died, and three more were taken ill. Still I congratulated myself I was no worse off, since other vessels had lost half their crews while in Port Royal, and some in much less time than we had remained there. We sailed prosperously through the windward passages, so close to Cuba that we could plainly distinguish the trees and shrubs growing upon it, and then shaped our course north-easterly, to clear the Bahamas and gain the great ocean. We had seen and lost sight of Crooked Island three days, when it became all at once a dead calm; even the undulation of the sea, commonly called the ground swell, subsided; the sails hung slackened on the yards; the vessel slept like a turtle on the ocean, which became as smooth as a summer mill-pond. The atmosphere could not have sustained a feather; cloudless and clear the blue serene above and the water below were alike spotless, shadowless, and stagnant. Disappointment and impatience were exhibited by us all, while the sun flaring from the burning sky, melted the pitch in the rigging till it ran down on the decks, and a beef-steak might have been broiled on the anchor-fluke. We could not pace the planks without blistering our feet, until I ordered an awning over the deck for our protection: but still the languor we experienced was overpowering. A dead calm is always viewed with an uneasy sensation by seamen, but in the present case it was more than usually unwelcome; to the sick it denied the freshness of the breeze that would have mitigated in some degree their agonies; and it gave a predisposition to the healthy to imbibe the contagion, lassitude and despondency being its powerful auxiliaries. Assisted by the great heat, the fever appeared to decompose the very substance of the blood; and its progress was so rapid, that no medicine could operate before death closed the scene of suffering. I had no surgeon on board, but from a medicine-chest I in vain administered the common remedies: but what remedies could be expected to act with efficacy, where the disease destroyed life almost as quickly as the current of life circulated! I had now but five men able to do duty, and never can I forget my feelings when three of these were taken ill on the fourth day of our unhappy inactivity. One of the sick expired, as I stood by his cot, in horrible convulsions. His skin was of a deep saffron hue; watery blood oozed from every pore, and from the corners of his eyes, he seemed dissolving into blood, liquefying into death. Another man rushed upon deck in a fit of delirium, and sprang over the ship's side into the very jaws of the numerous sharks that hovered ravenous around us, and seemed to be aware of the havoc death was making. A I had now the dreadful prospect of seeing all that remained perish, and prayed to God I might not be the last; for I should then become an ocean solitary, dragging on a life of hours in every second. A day's space must then been an age of misery. There was still no appearance of a breeze springing up; the horrible calm appeared as if it would last for ever. A storm would have been welcome. The irritating indolence, the frightful loneliness and tranquility, that reigned around, united with the frequent presence of human dissolution, thinning our scanty number, was more than the firmest nerves could sustain without yielding to despair. Sleep fled far from me; I paced the deck at night, gazing upon the remnant of my crew in silence, and they upon me, hopeless and speechless. I looked at the brilliant stars that shone in tropical glory, with feverish and impatient feelings, wishing I were among them, or bereft of consciousness, or were anything but a man. heavy presentiment of increasing evil bore down my spirits. I regarded the unruffled sea, dark and glassy, and the reflection of the heavens in it, as a sinner would have contemplated the mouth of bell. The scene, so beautiful at another time, was terrible under my circumstances. I was overwhelmed with present and anticipated misery. Thirty years I had been accustomed to a sea-life, but I had never contemplated that so horrible a situation as mine was possible; I had never imagined any state half so frightful could exist, though storms had often placed my life in jeopardy, and I had been twice shipwrecked. In the last misfortune, mind and body were actively employed, and I had no leisure to brood over the future. To be passive, as I now was, with destruction creeping towards me inch by inch-to perceive the most horrible fate advancing slowly upon me, and be obliged to await its approach, pinioned, fixed to the spot, powerless, unable to keep the hopes of deliverance alive by exertion,—such a situation was the extreme of mortal suffering, a pain of mind language is inadequate to describe, and I endured in silence the full weight of its infliction. My mate and cabin-boy were now taken with the disease; and on the evening of the fifth day Will Stokes, the oldest seaman on board, breathed his last just at the going down of the sun. At midnight another died. By the light of the stars we committed them to the ocean, though while wrapping the hammock round the body of the last, the effluvia from the rapid putrefaction was so overpowering and nauseous, that it was with difficulty got upon deck and flung into its unfathomable grave. The dull plash of the carcass, as it plunged in, I shall never forget, raising lucid circles on the dark unruffled water, and breaking the obstinate silence of the time; it struck my heart with a thrilling chillness; a rush of indescribable feeling came over me. Even now this sepulchral sound strikes at times on my ear during sleep, in its loneliness of horror, and I fancy I am again in the ship. These mournful entombments were viewed by us at last with that unconcern which is shown by men rendered desperate from circumstances. Disease and dissolution were become every-day matters to us, and the fear of death had lost its power; nay, we rather trembled at the thought of surviving thus does habitude fit us for the most terrible situations. The last precaution I took was to remove the sick to the deck, under the shelter of a wet sail, to afford them coolness. The next that died was my old townsman Job Watson. Just after I had seen him expire, about ten o'clock in the evening, when all around was like the stillness in a dead world, I was leaning over the taffril and looking upon the ocean's face, that from its placidity and attraction to the eye was, to me and mine, like an angel of destruction clothed in beauty, when on a sudden I became free from anxiety, obdurate, reckless of every thing. I imagined I had taken leave of hope for ever, and an apathy came upon me little removed from despair. I was ready for my destiny, come when it might. I got rid of a load of anxiety that I could not have carried much longer, so that even when the rising moon showed me the body of the mate, which we had thrown into the water, floating on its back, half disenveloped from its hammockwhen I saw its livid and ghastly features covered only by an inch of transparent sea, and a huge shark preparing his hungry jaws to prey upon it,-I drew not back, but kept my eye coldly upon it, as if it had been the most indifferent object upon earth; for I was as insensible to emotion as a statue would have been. This insensibility enabled me to undertake any office for the sick, and to drag the bodies of the dead to the ship's side and fling them overboard; for at last no one else was left to do it. All, save myself, were attacked with the disorder, and one by one died before the ninth day was completed, save James Robson, the least athletic man I had, and who, judging from constitution, was but little likely to have survived. The disorder left him weak as a child; I gave him the most nourishing things I could find; I carried him, a mere skeleton, into my cabin, and placed him on a fresh bed, flinging his own and all the other's overboard. I valued him as the only living thing with me in the vessel, though, had he died, I should at the time have felt little additional pain. I regarded him as one brute animal would have looked at another in such a situation. How the ship was to be navigated by one man, and what means I possessed of keeping her afloat in case of blowing weather should come on, gave me no apprehension; I was too much proof against the fear of the future, or any danger that it might bring. Robson could give me no assistance; I had therefore to rely on my own exertion for everything. If the vessel ever moved again, I must hand and steer-though, from the continuation of the calm, it did not seem likely I should be soon called upon to do either. I kept watch at night upon deck; and could not sleep, either by day or night, only by short snatches, extended at full length near the helm. On the tenth night, while the sea was yet in the repose of the grave around me, I fell into a doze, and was assailed with horrible dreams that precluded my receiving refreshment from rest. I aroused myself, and the silence on every side seemed more terrible than ever. Clouds were rising over the distant sea-line, and obscuring the stars; and the ocean put on a gloomy aspect. Millions of living things, which had ascended from the caverns of the deep, or been crgendered from the stagnation and heat, played in snaky antics on it surface. No sailor was now pacing the deck on his accustomed watch. The want of motion in the ship, and her powerless sails hanging in festoons amid the diminishing starlight, added to the solitary feeling which, in spite of my apathy, I experienced. I thought myself cut off from mankind for ever, and that my ship, beyond where winds ever blew, would lie and rot upon the corrupting sea. I forgot the melancholy fate of my crew at this moment, and thought, with comparative unconcern, that the time must soon come when the last draught of water being finished. “I too must die." Then, half slumbering, a thousand strange images would come before my sight; the countenance of my late mate, or some one of the crew, was frequently among them, distorted and fitted upon uncouth bodies. I felt feverish and unwell on awaking. One moment I fancied I saw a vessel pass the ship under full sail, and with a stiff breeze, and then a second, while no ruffle appeared on the ocean near mine, and I hailed them in vain. Now I heard the tramp of feet upon the deck, and the whisper of voices, as of persons walking near me, whom I uselessly challenged; this was followed by the usual obdurate silence. I felt no fear; for nature had no visitation for mortal man more appalling than I had already encountered: and to the ultimate of evils with social man, as I have before observed, I was insensible-for what weight could social ideas of good or evil have with me at such a moment: The morning of the eleventh day of my suffering I went down into the cabin, to take some refreshment to Robson. Though at intervals in the full possession of his senses, the shortest rational conversation exhausted him; while talking in his incoherent fits did not produce the same debilitating effect. "Where is the mate?” he wildly asked me ;-"Why am I in your cabin, captain? Have they flung Waring overboard yet?" I contented myself with giving him general answers, which appeared to satisfy him. I feared to tell him we were the only survivors; for the truth, had he chanced to comprehend it in its full force, might have been fatal. On returning upon the deck, I observed that clouds were slowly forming, while the air became doubly oppressive and sultry. The intensity of the sun's rays was exchanged for a closer, and even more suffocating heat, that indicated an alteration of some kind in the atmosphere. Hope suddenly awoke in my bosom again: a breeze might spring up, and I might get free from my horrible captivity. I took an observation, and found that I was clear of the rocks and shoals of the Bahamas, towards which I feared a current might have insensibly borne me; all I could do, therefore, in case the wind blew, was to hang out a signal of distress, and try to keep the sea until I fell in with some friendly vessel. I immediately took measures for navigating the ship by myself. I fastened a rope to secure the helm in any position I might find needful, so that I might venture to leave it a few moments when occasion required. I went aloft, and cut away the topsails which I could not reef, and reduced the canvas all over the ship as much as possible, leaving only one or two of the lower sails set for if it blew fresh, I could not have taken them in and the ship might perish; while by doing this, I had some chance of keeping her alive. : I now anxiously watched the clouds which seemed to be in motion, and the sight was a cordial to me. At last the sea began to heave with gentle undulations; a slight ripple succeeded, and bore new life with it. I wept for joy. and then laughed as I saw it shake the sails and gradually fill them; and when at length the brig moved, just at noon on the eleventh day after our becalmment commenced, I became almost mad with delight. It was like a resurrection from the dead; it was |