science and morals? More so! What is entitled to indulgence, if self-denial be not? Who deserves the blessing of brandy, if the Teetotaler should taste not a drop? Is it not a popular maxim, one of the wisest within the compass of practical philosophy, that a good resolution ought to be treated? How preferable is this to the shabby, stingy, cheating principle, that virtue is its own reward! in other words, that temperance should be content with tea-drinking. So, then, the intemperate are to have all the good things; the dram-drinker is to monopolise the drams; and he whose bosom glows with the love of teetotalism is never to warm the cockles of his heart!

See to what excesses this shallow, shabby, swindling doctrine (the virtue-is-its-own-reward doctrine) would lead! Even while we are writing, our eye wanders to a statement in the papers, that the use of opium as a means of intoxication, is spreading rapidly in those districts especially "where the well-intentioned enthusiasts, vulgarly called Teetotalers, most abound!" It is positively asserted, that it is among those communities in which ardent spirits have been abjured, that the practice of opium-eating has increased! So much for the virtue of the virtuous who would abolish cakes and ale! So much for taking Temperance at her word, and thus putting her out of temper with herself by interpreting her "No, I thank ye!" literally! So much for the philosophically ignorant assumption, that it would be a coarse compliment, and an absurd contradiction, to ask Abstinence to dinner! It is plain that some of the Teetotalers have been carrying the joke rather too far. They have been trying to convince us that they are in earnest by going mad. They have been driven into a horrible degree of self-indulgence, by the effort to establish an example of self-denial. Opium-eating a consequence of anti-gin-drinking! Thus have priests in certain countries found a plurality of loves the only substitute for the denied gratification of one legitimate passion: thus do too many laymen in this, devoutly abandon small vices, for the sake of the greater sins" they are inclined to!" And thus it is with all men at all times. People are very apt in their resolution to put off a bad habit, to put on a worse: a man lays down his snuff-box as a source of slight but injurious excitement, and takes up the dice box because stronger excitement is indispensable to him. If we succeed in checking a habit of ostentation, do we not grow wonderfully proud of our humility? Mark the man who cures himself, by repeated efforts, of inordinate vanity; how horribly vain he is of his achievement; how conceited of his freedom from vanity? That, as times

go, is an excellent species of moral reform, which only substitutes one vice for another of the same size; but this cannot be said of the substitution of insidious opium for generous wine or honest heavy!

A party has recently sprung up at certain public meetings, which is noisily distinguished from every other sect: it is called The Tin-Canister Party!" Can it be that these are the Teetotalers bent upon a practical demonstration of the moderateness of their views, and the sobriety of their dispositions? Teetotalism may be known, we suspect, by the sign of the tin-canister. Temperance is excessively talkative, always making a great clatter about its own merits. and the demerits of everything intemperate. The tin-canister party is assuredly the political type of the Teetotalers.

The Teetotaler who is really in earnest should be told that temperance is a very expensive virtue. A friend of ours, only last Saturday night, out of a dinner party of a dozen, chose, most unreflectingly, to be the only man who dined simply, and drank sparingly. In short, he was the only one of the twelve who could say he was sober; with the other eleven, speaking was not so easy. He has bewailed his misfortune ever since he had to pay for the party! No soul else could unbutton a breeches-pocket. The waiter marked him for his own, and so has melancholy. His plea henceforth will be, that he cannot afford the costly virtue of sobriety; he is too poor to come away sober.

Temperance won't do. If you want to know where they have always on draught a genuine glass of "jolly good ale, and old," call upon a Teetotaler ;—he will take you the nearest way: for the calm, soothing, sobering thimbleful before breakfast, he is also your man. He needs it; for he will tell you that he stayed so long at the meeting over-night, and imbibed so plenteously in the good cause, that he got "half-teas over" before the termination of the proceedings. Enthusiasm now, he says, is necessary to success, for the assemblages are falling off. He fears they must give a gin-palace air to their tea-parlour; decorate it externally with prodigious slop-basins and sugar-tongs. They cannot go on, even in a joke, persuading people that Paradise was a tea-garden. Things are going wrong with them there was a sad lack of "spoons" at the last meeting. There was a want of harmony; the kettle would n't sing. The teapot, he laments to say, don't draw!

THE FACTORY CHILD.*

BY DOUGLAS JERROLD.

"OPEN your mouth, my little maid. Ha! yes! very good! Here they are, the whole four."

"Bless me! Well, she's very small,-remarkably small."

"True, sir; but here, here, you perceive, is the test. As I said, the whole four."

"I perceive; and yet she is very small!"

The reader may take the above as a part of the dialogue of the certifying surgeon and the inspector of a cotton factory, to which establishment a puny, white-faced little girl, apparently about seven years old, is a baby candidate for toil. Certain we are she does not look a day more than seven; and yet, having submitted her mouth to the professional inspection of Mr. Enamel, she is pronounced to be of the legal age,—full nine; and, therefore, by act of parliament, admissible as day-labourer in the factory of Brown and Jones; who, with other masters, have made the teeth a test of age;-a test pronounced by the profession to be almost infallible.†

And

"Well, if you are certain,"observes the inspector. "Certain ! Look here sir; open your mouth, girl." again the child, casting uneasy glances at the "certifying" authority, opens her mouth; and Mr. Enamel, displaying her teeth and gums to the inspector, proceeds in the tone of a lecturer, tears rolling

It is now six years since the writer of this paper essayed a drama, the purpose of which was an appeal to public sympathy in the cause of the Factory Children: the drama was very summarily condemned; cruelly maimed the first night, and mortally killed on its second representation. The subject of the piece "was low-distressing." The truth is, it was not then la mode to affect an interest for the "coarse and vulgar" details of human life; and the author suffered because he was two or three years before the fashion. This circumstance, however, is only now alluded to, that the writer of the present paper may not be supposed to have unseemingly entered upon ground taken within these few days by a lady-writer,but as only claiming the right to return to a subject he had before, in adverse times, adventured on.

+ See "The Teeth a Test of Age, considered with Reference to the Factory Children;" by Edwin Saunders.

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