Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 425, March, 1851

No. CCCCXXV. MARCH, 1851. Vol. LXIX.
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BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCXXV.
MARCH, 1851.
Vol. LXIX.
We entirely concur in these eloquent and just observations, though the honest and candid admissions they contain sound rather strange when coming from a journal which has, for nearly half-a-century, been the most strenuous, and not the least able, supporter of the system which has terminated in these woful results. We concur with this author in thinking, that it never was intended by Providence that things in this country should be as they now are; and that it is impossible they can long continue so. Sooner or later, if the premonitory symptoms of our diseased state continue to be disregarded by our rulers, and the influential part of the nation who now determine our policy, as they have been for a great number of years back, some terrible catastrophe will arise, like that in Ireland by the failure of the potato crop in 1846, which, amidst an appalling and perhaps unprecedented amount of human suffering, is in course of rectifying many of the social evils under which that ill-starred country has so long laboured. We narrowly escaped such a catastrophe on occasion of the great monetary crisis of October 1847, by far the most serious and widespread which Great Britain has ever known; and so much was the nation in its vital resources weakened by that calamity, and so wearing-out and grievous are the causes of evil still operating amongst us, that it is much to be feared that the catastrophe we anticipate will not be deferred beyond the next of the periodical monetary crises with which the country is now so regularly afflicted.
In Scotland, a new great sect of Presbyterians has grown up more suited than the Establishment to the inclinations of a large part of the people, and they have, in three years, built and provided for eight hundred new places of worship, at a cost of above £1,500,000. In Glasgow alone, thirty-two have been erected, at a cost of £107,000! besides fifteen , erected a few years before, by subscription of persons connected with the Establishment. The prodigious efforts made by the dignitaries and pastors of the Church of England, to extend the sphere and increase the utility of their Establishment, are known to all the world, and have extorted the reluctant applause even of the most inveterate of their opponents. All other religious persuasions have done the same: Roman Catholics, Methodists, Wesleyans, Dissenters of all sorts, have vied with each other in zeal and efforts to extend their respective adherents, and augment the number and respectability of their places of worship. Education has shared in the general movement; and although Government has yet done little, the number of voluntary schools established in most parts of the country almost exceeds belief. At the same time, the average poor-rates of England have for the last ten years been about £6,000,000. Scotland has got a more efficient one than the cautious administration of the old law had permitted, which already expends about £500,000 yearly on the relief of indigence: and Ireland has got a new one, which at its greatest distress expended above £2,000,000 in a year, and still dispenses upwards of £1,500,000 annually. Yet, in the midst of all this prodigious increase of national industry, religious zeal, and philanthropic activity, the condition of the greater part of our working classes has been daily getting worse, and was never perhaps, as a whole, so bad as in this year, when, in consequence of Continental pacification, Bank discounts at 2½ per cent, and a great influx of Californian gold, prices of manufactured articles have risen 20 per cent, and the great manufacturing towns are in a state of general prosperity. Ample evidence of all this will be brought forward in the sequel of this essay.