LONDON: SIMPKIN AND MARSHALL, STATIONER'S COURT. 1856. 232.C.87. PREFA СЕ. THESE brief Essays were mostly contributed to a Periodical published monthly in the village of Eltham, in Kent, in the years 1854-5. Reading, as I did, with much satisfaction, the purposes of the "Eltham Journal," as set forth in its first number, it appeared to me to offer a convenient and opportune means of inculcating better acquaintance with the leading and most important principles of social economy. I felt sure that if I could do this in a manner to engage attention, and to make the subjects themselves more clearly understood and better appreciated, I could not fail to render this unpretending Journal, to some extent, as useful in this respect as it might hope to be in the range of its subjects generally. I felt also that there could not be any instruction more beneficial to those readers whose education had not conveyed to them such knowledge, nor any occupation more congenial to my own mind. than that of communicating to them so much information on those important subjects as the opportunity of leisure had enabled me to acquire for myself. of Taking into review the condition of the working classes of this country, the Eltham Journal commences its career with an effort to explain the causes of that depressed and unimproved condition which characterizes them, notwithstanding that their wages, in many instances, exceed the stipends of Curates in the Established Church, and the average of those of Dissenting Ministers, the pay Surgeons in the Navy and Army, and the average salaries of Clerks in warehouses and countinghouses, &c., and tracing these to the improvident and otherwise imprudent (and too often depraved) habits of their lives, and these again to that want of christian education or training, as respects the conduct of life, which their own particular position in society as much as possible requires; this Journal shows that, as respects the practical interests and duties of human life, large masses of the population are, to all intents and purposes, as uncivilized as if they had been born and bred in the very heart of Africa itself. How otherwise, it remarks, are we to account for those intemperate habits in men, which impel them to the coarse, wanton, and cruel assaults on the weaker sex, and in particular on their own wives, which characterize and so shamefully disgrace the operative population of this country at the present time. Such sad evidence and proof of depraved morality and general bad dispositions and habits of life, could surely not exist if they had been rightly taught to estimate the interests and duties of social life, and made to feel, as they should do, that their welfare, as members of a good and prosperous community, must, to a great extent, depend on the manner in which they apply themselves to render the laws subservient to their own personal welfare. If in this way people will not help themselves, the best arrangements of society and the wisest legislation, must fail to do so; for, as this Journal most properly and emphatically observes, "self help" lies at the foundation of all human prosperity. To help, therefore, this small periodical, thus so |