order might, in a century, people a province. The islands in the Southern Ocean were probably peopled by similar means; and there exists not the slightest reason to doubt the literal truth of the Scriptural declaration, that of one blood all the families of the earth were made.

The sight of the real native, the true American Indian, is becoming rare, and the Colonel congratulates himself on the opportunity offered by his arrival at Penetangueshane, the most westerly post of the British troops in Upper Canada. There he saw upwards of two thousand-some came to claim protection, but the majority to receive the customary presents. The savages approached with a sort of Pyrrhic dance-the young warriors of the tribe advanced from the shore where they had landed, towards the council ground, dancing to the measured cadence of the wardrum, and displaying, with much energy, the mode in which they were ready to fight for the flag under which they moved; for a banner, formed of the British standard, waved over their heads. Each warrior, with his knees bent, his body lowered, and all his weapons ready for action, advanced in a sort of jumping and stamping motion, singing a low and melancholy war-song, in time to the sounds of a drum covered with a skin. But this was merely a preliminary pantomime, the specimen of an Indian march through the woods. In the presence of the white man, they could exhibit themselves in more dignified aspects. They had no sooner arrived at the gate of the commandant's house, where the British were waiting for them, than the song and the drum ceased; every warrior quitted the crouching attitude and stealthy pace, and, erecting himself to his full height, brandished his weapons, and gave the war-whoop. This the Colonel describes as "the most terrific of all sounds." It undoubtedly may be so when heard in the forest, and telling the unlucky hearer that he has fallen into an Indian ambuscade; but, heard where it does not "argue that foregone conclusion," as the Colonel must then have heard it, it is merely a very loud scream, and much more like the yell of a crowd of quarrelling women than the sign of an "onslaught of warriors." In short, on its simple merits, and as

we have heard it in broad day, and without the fear of the tomahawk before our eyes, it seemed one of the most contemptible signals of conflict that can be imagined. The Cossack "hourra" is worth all the war-whoops from Labrador to the Pacific. The charging shout of a British infantry regiment has a hundred times the warlike animation, and, by natural consequence, the warlike terror, of both. The war-whoop is a mere savage howl.

But the display of the savages themselves was sufficiently grotesque. Singular as their taste may seem, dandyism never arrived at a more studied system among the exquisites of May Fair, or the élégants of the Chaussée d'Antin, than among the naked murderers and unsparing scalpers of the far west. Nay, the most rouge-loving belle of the Tuileries, is not fonder of decorating her physiognomy with colours denied by nature. Among the exhibitors on this occasion, there was but one (and he belonging to another tribe, who probably thought it contrary to etiquette to appear in the parade uniform) who was not totally covered with paint. Diversity was the evident charm. The whole frame was naked, excepting the loins, which were girt with a strip of blue cloth. One half of the figure, from the neck downwards, including the right arm and leg, was black; the other half, with tasteful impartiality, was white. The face-painting was of a still more elaborate order-it was red, white, or black, with bright vermilion streaks, which gave them a most terrific look, particularly when the wearer had added the grace of tattooing to the general effect of those fire-coloured features. We can conceive nothing more demoniac.

But they even have refinements in the picturesque; they wear mourning. Those who have lost a squaw, or a near relative, paint their visages all over black, and wear their sable, like Europeans, for a stated time. A savage gentleman who had thus lost his better half, would no more be seen out of sable for the fashionable period, than a young widow would appear without her cap, until it has supplied due notice that she is open to a second proposal.

The Colonel gives us what we have long desired to see a true Indian

speech. We never have been able to digest Jonathan's specimens of the forest oratory. The Yankee is so much a matter-of-fact man in buying and selling, covenanting and chicaning, that when he gets into the regions of fancy, he indulges himself in the most highflying compensation, and makes the Demosthenes of the woods mouth out magniloquence of the most intolerable kind. The speech which the Colonel heard was of another calibre-a simple and yet forcible exposition of some of the distresses which are gradually either driving the Indian to the extreme west, or extinguishing him in the general mass of the European population.

The old "Sachem," or chief, who was the general spokesman, stated, that "his young men sought the protection of their Great Father beyond the Great Lake, (the ocean,) and that they had quitted for ever the soil which covered the bones of their ancestors, to smoke the calumet of peace with the British warriors; that his tribe had sold their war-horses, and were no longer an equestrian nation; that this sale was for the purchase of the canoes, and provisions necessary for traversing the 1500 miles which they had come to the present meeting; and that the Long-knives (the Yankees) having taken up the hatchet to exterminate them, and having bought all their land, the old men, the young, and their squaws, had now only to look for happiness to their Great Father (the King of England,) for which the tribe had fought, and watered the earth with their blood; as his young men were about to show to the British warriors. But,' said he, striking the pole of his rude ensign, which they had planted in the centre of the council ground, I have been a brave warrior, and have had sixty scalps in my wigwam. Ha! is not this true, my young men, which your father tells the pale faces?""

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This appeal was answered by an unanimous assent, in the shape of Ugh, ugh, ugh! It is true, father." On this, the Sachem closed his speech, by striking the flag-staff again, which is regarded as a peculiar pledge of Indian honour.

The next performance consisted of exhibition of the Indian mode of

penetrating the forest to surprise the Yankees, to whom the natives in this quarter seem to have a very unequivocal aversion. This was done by two warriors, the latter of whom might give some valuable ideas to our compilers of melodrama. This man was said to be one of the subtlest and ablest warriors of the tribe. "I can liken," says the Colonel, "this last exhibitor, with his long, thin, bony arms; his emaciated body, on which the protruding ribs were painted black and white to resemble a skeleton; his wide and well-armed mouth; his scowling brow and piercing eye, combined with the lynx-like crouching attitude, to nothing less than those images of the arch-fiend which haunt our schoolboy conceptions."

The pantomime, though on this narrow scale in point of the "dramatis personæ," was a very close and clever representation of the dexterity, perseverance, and variety of the native tactics. The savage is a man of sense; he knows nothing of showing himself at full length to bayonet or bullet. His purpose is to kill, and not to be killed. He has no gazettes to figure in, and no desire to exhibit among their killed and wounded, if he had. In short, to take off his enemy's scalp without hazarding a hair of his own, is the triumph of the man of the woods. He acts like a person warring on his own account, unwilling to part with any of his limbs, and possessing a perfect sense of his value to society.

We have noticed these volumes, be.. cause they are evidently the work of an accomplished and intelligent person; but we must expect larger detail of the manners, feelings, and interests of the Canadian people from his pen. His long residence, and his important duties, must give peculiar authority to his statements; and not by any means underrating the excellence of his geological attainments, we shall hope to see his knowledge of stratification reserved for a work purely scientific, while he gives us anecdotes of the people, information on the prospects of those great colonies, and advice on the principles which have been, and are wanting, in the government of one of the noblest regions ever peopled by British enterprise.

THE present age is, in a peculiar manner, distinguished by the interest which the social and moral condition of the working classes generally awakens. Political economy, with its rigid maxims, its cold indifference to human suffering, and its exclusive attention to national wealth, has ceased to present its wonted attractions to the great majority of readers. It is felt that there are other things of moment in human affairs than the nature and causes of the wealth of nations; that the most splendid growth of national opulence may be co-existent with the greatest debasement in national character; that wealth may indeed accumulate, and men decay. Hence, while the abstract and coldblooded speculations of political economy have fallen into general disrepute, and many of its apparently best established propositions have been ascertained by experience to be either unfounded or inapplicable to the present mixed condition of human affairs, a warm and rapidly increasing interest has come to be taken in those enquiries, which, founded upon a more extended basis, regard man, not merely as a physical and intellectual, but a moral being; and which, without disregarding public wealth as an important element in general prosperity, proceed on the principle, that the true causes of national greatness and prosperity are to be found in the moral and religious character of the people.

That a vast and most important change has come over Great Britain during the last twenty years, must be obvious to the most superficial observer, and has long formed the subject of exultation to one set of politicians, and regret to another. The increase of our manufacturing and commercial industry during that period, has exceeded any thing ever before witnessed in an old state, from the beginning of the world. Since 1815, our imports and exports have both more than doubled; the shipping, British and

foreign, employed in carrying on our trade, has advanced 250 per cent; and the exports to the United States of America and our colonies alone, are now greater than our total exports to all the world put together during the war. Population, keeping pace with this astonishing augmentation of industry, has advanced with surprising and, in an old state, unprecedented rapidity; the eighteen millions which the British islands contained in 1815, have now turned into eight-and-twenty millions; and what is still more surprising, such have been the improvements in our agriculture, and the skill and industry of our rural population, that not only has this enormous increase of human beings, accompa. nied as it has been by a still greater augmentation of animals of luxury, been provided for, and amply provided for, except in seasons of unusual scarcity, by the efforts of our own cultivators, but this has been done by a body of husbandmen who have been progressively decreasing, instead of increasing, as is shown by the returns of the population during this period of unexampled augmentation in the demands upon the produce of their industry.

It would be well for Great Britain if the statement could stop here, and the historian had to record that this prodigious augmentation in population, wealth, and industry, had been attended with no diminution in general prosperity, public health, religious instruction, or moral conduct in the working classes of the community. Unfortunately, however, this is very far, indeed, from being the case; and if one side of the picture exhibits the elements of prosperity in unprecedented vigour amongst us, the other points not less clearly to a still more alarming augmentation of misery, pauperism, and crime. This has long been familiar to all persons practically acquainted with the condition of the working classes, especially in our great manufacturing towns, or seats of commercial industry. Parliamentary re

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turns, also, from time to time, especially those connected with the progress of crime and pauperism, in every part of the country, have thrown an important light upon this lamentable downward progress; but they have not hitherto obtained so much attention as their importance deserves, partly from the general reluctance of men to admit or face an evil for which they could not see a remedy, and partly because great part of the information on the subject was derived from individual or local information, which was either unknown to, or disregarded by, the great majority of those who are not within the sphere of the evils forming the subject of complaint.

The late census of the population, which has been taken with so much industry and accuracy over the whole empire, has now in great part removed the difficulty of obtaining authentic information on this subject. We are now in possession of nearly the exact numbers of the people in every part of the country, in the year 1841; and this, coupled with the returns at the previous decennary periods, since the beginning of this century, affords the only secure basis for all such investigations, by establishing the rate of increase in the people, to which the increase of all other things regarding them may be compared. These returns, coupled with the criminal returns, and those under the poor-laws, both in England and Ireland, and the reports of the RegistrarGeneral, as to the rate of mortality in the different parts of the country, will afford by far the most valuable elements of information which have ever yet been presented to the public, regarding the social and moral condition of the people in the British islands; and they will present ample materials on which the philanthropist may mourn, the philosopher may meditate, and the statesman should act.

In anticipation of the more extended, though not more important information which the general returns laid before Parliament, and ordered to be printed, will afford, we do not know that we can more usefully employ the time of our readers than by directing their attention to the light which the taking up of the census, and the other Parliamentary returns which have been in progress for some years, have thrown upon the unexampled progress

of the population, and the present social and moral condition of Lanarkshire. That that great county is by far the most important in Scotland, and second only to Lancashire in the empire, in point of commerce and manufactures, is universally known; but the immense extent of its progress within the last ten years, exhibiting, as it does, an American rate of increase, in one of the old and densely peopled states of Europe, is not so generally understood; and still less are the British people aware of the dreadful consequences with which this vast increase of manufacturing industry has been accompanied, upon the health and morals of the community. Such an enquiry is not matter merely of local interest. A county which contains four hundred and thirty-five thousand inhabitants, and embraces a city containing above two hundred and eighty thousand within its limits, may well challenge attention as an object of national interest; and it becomes an object of peculiar consequence at the present juncture, when the comparative importance of agriculture and manufactures is the great question at issue which agitates society, and a considerable political party are straining every nerve to induce the legislature to sacrifice the rural population to promote the supposed interests of those great marts of manufacturing industry, of which Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Lanark shire, are the most important and conspicuous.

The information on these momentous topics in regard to Lanarkshire, is now more complete than any other part of the British Empire. The labours of the late Dr Cleland had long ago thrown an unwonted light upon the statistics of the great and growing city of Glasgow; and, since his time, still more important and accurate results have been obtained from the numerous enquiries under Parliamentary authority, or by private exertion and benevolence, which have been set on foot in that great emporium of commercial activity. And the most important results of these different enquiries have now been embodied in a short but most valuable pamphlet, by Mr Alexander Watt, who acted as superintendent, under the appointment of the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, for taking up the census of the subur