Manchester is highly prejudicial to female delicacy and modesty— the great safeguards of virtue. But this evil is not so immediately felt where the fellow-lodgers have been long known to each other, and have formed friendly intimacies; a feeling of respect, even under the most unfavourable circumstances, is engendered by an intimacy between two families. The cellars of Liverpool, however, want even this miserable compensation; strangers are received as lodgers in most of them; strangers, too, fresh from the sea, with passions fermenting from the long absence of gratification, and with the recklessness of consequences which the prospect of immediate separation inspires. The crowd is brought together under the very circumstances best suited to render the assemblage dangerous; and, to those who have seen the circumstances. the physical circumstances, to which poor girls round the docks are exposed, the wonder is not that many have fallen, but that any have escaped. Juvenile employment is very scarce in Liverpool; with all the evils of the factory system, it certainly is productive of one great good, it gives the young something to do. The very worst-managed mill that ever disgraced a country is still a better place for the youth of both sexes than the streets. It is true that schools in some degree remedy this deficiency; and it is but justice to say that the schools for the lower classes in Liverpool, without any reference to distinction of party, are admirably managed; yet, between the ages of fourteen and twenty it is rare to find youth at school, and this is precisely the period when the first developement of nascent passions renders restraint most necessary. Casual employment is particularly dangerous to persons of this class; it gives them notions of independence; it renders them impatient of parental authority; but at the same time it leaves them in the midst of seduction and temptation, with the greater portion of their time hanging heavy on their hands. Some of these are the children of parents who have no sensibility to the evils of their condition, because they themselves had no experience of a better condition in their youth; and not a few of them are initiated in the ways of vice by fathers and mothers, whose precepts, and, still more, whose example, might corrupt children the most strongly inclined to virtue and obedience. Others, and perhaps the greatest number, are the children of inefficient parents, who do not control, and who believe that they are not able to control, the waywardness and vagrant propensities of their children. To all remonstrances against letting their children wander about the street, they answer, we have no home to keep them in.” It may be fairly confessed that a great number of these youths find employment as errand-boys in shops and offices; but they form only a fragment of the juvenile population, and the species of employment which they obtain, instead of inclining and qualifying them for the steady labours of an apprenticeship, has the most direct tendency to lead them into the class of idlers and vagrants. This evil is not felt so sensibly in the manufacturing districts as it is in Liverpool, because there is a demand for juvenile labour in the factories; were there not such a demand, the accumulation of such dense masses in narrow limits, with such miserably inadequate means of accommodation, would produce an amount of vice and particularly of juvenile vice, which would render the system unendurable. 66 The sea is in Liverpool the only resource for youths; but this is only open to one sex, and to a small fragment even of that sex. It is very doubtful whether it would be desirable to increase the number of boys employed in the merchant service. Taken as a class, they are physically worse off than the children in the factories, and they are infinitely more exposed to corrupting influences. Those who have been educated are indeed as much exposed to the dangers enumerated as those who are destitute of instruction; but in the Liverpool schools for the poor, it deserves to be particularly marked, that more attention is paid to the training and the formation of habit than to the communication of mere book instruction. Everybody knows that education is a very sore subject in Liverpool, and that the Corporation and National schools have been made the theme of party controversy, which both in amount and degree resembled rather the fanatical feuds of Cromwell's age than a civil contention of the nineteenth century. But this rivalry has not been an unmixed evil: the leaders of parties soon discovered that cries and watchwords lost their force by repetition; and that the schools which paid most attention to the proper business and purpose of education would triumph in spite of oratory and misrepresentation; they therefore adjourned their speeches to improve their schools; and now, whenever a comparison is instituted, the test is not which can display the more theatrical orators, but which can produce the better scholars. Granting, however, everything that can be said for the influence of such training as a preventive check to juvenile delinquency, it is obvious that its influence must diminish after the child leaves school; and that if the youths between fourteen and twenty-one are exposed to the corrupting circumstances already noticed, a large number must become paupers and criminals, and the very education they have received in the schools may minister to their capacity for crime. There are many other circumstances, of perilous consequence to society, in the state of the juvenile portion of the lower ranks in Liverpool, on which it would be of importance to dwell, if there were reasonable hopes that measures for their amelioration would be adopted. One, however, is so striking to a casual visiter, and so generally unknown to the residents, that it deserves a little notice. Sunday in Liverpool is the day when the seductions of vice, and the corrupting influences of unhappy circumstances, act most intensely on the old and the young. A day of rest is enjoined; but how can those enjoy rest who have no place for repose? Issuing from his pestiferous cellar, the working man has only a choice between the place of worship and the alehouse. He ought to choose the former; but it needs not to tell that he does not, and that there are not, and cannot be, means for constraining him. The tavern affords him social converse, a comfortable place in which he can sit down, and the reading of a newspaper. Sunday is the only day on which he can see his friends, and the alehouse the only place in which he can meet them. We have made long and anxious inquiries on the subject, and we feel convinced that far the greater number of those who frequent the alehouse on Sunday are drawn thither, not by the love of liquor, but by the innocent and laudable desire for social communion. Many worthy persons are of opinion that the poor ought not to read newspapers, especially on Sunday. It is unnecessary to inquire whether this opinion is well or ill founded; because they will read the news on Sunday, whether we approve or disapprove of the practice. The only question for sane men to decide is, whether there is a possibility of separating the enjoyments from the adjuncts which render it vicious and depraving; whether a cheap temperance assembly and news' room would not thin the ranks of the alehouse; and whether, by affording time and opportunity for calm reflection, it may not become a vestibule to the place of worship. There are not means for the great bulk of the poor to spend the Sunday innocently within doors, and there is nearly as little for their taking rest in the open air. The progress of bricks and mortar and of inclosures has sadly restricted the spaces on which the English peasantry could take healthful exercise. Around Liverpool they are sadly restricted both in number and space. Respectable people keep away from these crowded spots. The influence of their example is lost, and in its place is substituted the influence of the idle, the dissolute, and the depraved. Were there a park or garden open, where the flowers, those silent preachers to which Christ himself referred his disciples as eloquent witnesses of the bounty of Providence,would speak lessons of loveliness to the soul, an immediate check would be given to gross vice and foul pollution. We too often forget the humanizing and moral effects of a garden. It was in a garden that our first parents were placed by infinite wisdom; and, unless we deny that attribute of Deity, we cannot evade the conclusion that such a locality is the best suited to inspire reflections on the bounties of that Providence, whose tender mercies are over all his works. "Consider the lilies of the 'field, they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." But there are those who say to the poor, 'You shall not consider the lilies of the field; for we are wiser than our master, and deny that they inculcate the lesson which he has pointed out." Were we even to grant that all recreations on Sunday are evil, which we are far from conceding, still we should say that there is only a choice of evils in the case of a dense and crowded population. Body and soul must suffer equally, if the poor be kept confined in those dens and cellars, compared with which prisons are palaces, and dungeons drawing-rooms. "Which of you having a sheep fallen into a pit on the Sabbath day will not lay hold on it and lift it out? But no pit into which an animal could fall is so noisome, so pernicious, or so replete with peril, as the dens of disease, misery, and vice to which the poorer classes are physically confined on the day designed by Providence for the alleviation of their condition. After a lapse of eighteen hundred years, the question has to be repeated, "How much is a man better than a sheep?" Juvenile vagrancy is a prolific source of juvenile delinquency; and many circumstances lead a visiter to believe that habits of vagrancy are very early formed among the children of Liverpool. In the course of a walk of about two hours, in the upper part of the town, thirteen children were found wandering about, crying that they had been lost, unable to tell the names of their parents, or the direction of their residences. If there be such neglect in tender years, we may safely conclude that there is not very efficient superintendence in mature years. The difference between the number of boys and girls to be seen in the streets of Liverpool and those seen in the streets of Manchester is one of the most striking circumstances of contrast between the two towns. Opportunities for crime create criminality; and, unfortunately, the necessary exposure of valuable property in the crowded docks of Liverpool, during the processes of shipping and unshipping, produces multitudinous temptations, which prove a fatal snare to the young and idle. The police force is numerous and vigilant, indeed it is nowhere better organised; but if each constable had the hundred eyes of Argus, and the hundred hands of Briareus, he would be baffled by the trained dexterity of the "dock-wallopers." Among the educational establishments of Liverpool, those for the instruction of young thieves ought not to be omitted. They appear to be conducted on the monitorial principle, combined with the peripatetic system devised by Aristotle; and they produce more promising pupils than have yet come from the establishments of Bell and Lancaster. The Corporation and National schools are indeed seriously cramping the influence of these predatorial seminaries, and consequently there is no class in the empire more vehement in its opposition to national education than the master-thieves of Liverpool. For many years the fury and pravity of a Liverpool mob have been proverbial; and it was supposed by those unacquainted with the town, that no great assemblage could take place without mischief. This is a very unjust and groundless supposition. In a period of excitement, it is not improbable that a mob in Liverpool may be just as mischievous as a mob anywhere else; but nowhere could a more orderly multitude be found than that which accompanies the annual procession of the shipwrights. With singular infelicity they have chosen the 29th of May for their anniversary, taking as their patron the monarch who did more to lower the character of the British navy, and injure the interests of British commerce, than all the other sovereigns of England put together. But this pardonable error is their only blunder. They make their anniversary festival an opportunity for furthering the interests of piety and charity, by attending some place of worship, where a sermon is preached, and a collection made for the support of some charitable institution. The procession itself is orderly, and admirably conducted; and there are few customs which seem better calculated to generate and preserve those feelings of self-respect, which are the greatest safeguard of morality in the working population. The great improvement in the shop-fronts in Liverpool, as in London, is a gratifying and healthy sign of the times. Some years since, it would have been supposed that such expensive decorations would have been a temptation to mischief; that plate-glass would be broken, gilt ornaments wrenched away, and Grecian pillars carved and hacked into some barbarous dis-order. Here, however, undoubted experience has proved the humanising effects of taste, and indisputably shown that there is a close connection between the ceptions of physical and moral beauty. The more beautiful a shop is, the less is it liable to wanton defacement; and there is some evidence to show that it also becomes less liable to depredation. This subject, however, opens too extensive a field to be discussed incidentally. At present it will be sufficient to say, that the moral influences arising from the cultivation and the gratification of taste are per of great importance, and have been too long and too generally neglected. Though there is much to lament, and something to blame, in the condition of the working classes in Liverpool, especially those of the lowest grade, it is only justice to add, that nowhere are there more ardent aspirations and more zealous efforts for their amelioration. Pity it is that many of these are poisoned by the spirit of party, and that the accomplishment of an acknowledged good is often adjourned until some doubtful question of religion or politics be adjusted, the connection of which with the object in view it would puzzle dipus himself to determine. It would be a decided improvement to introduce the old rule of controversy in Liverpool, "Ere we to further argument advance, 'Tis mighty fit that we should have a dance;" for a dance is more pleasant and less mischievous than a controversial debate; and it is more pleasant to listen to a fiddle than to a longwinded orator. Liverpool is peculiarly fortunate in possessing an energetic, intelligent, and enterprising middle class, and it bids fair not merely to perpetuate, but greatly to increase, in all its elements of prosperity. There is not within the seas of Britain an educational establishment better conducted than the schools for the middle and higher classes connected with the Mechanics' Institute; there is nowhere a course of instruction better calculated to form and unite the characters of a man of business, a gentleman, and a Christian. Liverpool must improve; for the foundations of its advancement are securely laid in the hearts and souls of a future generation. LOVE'S GOOD MORROW. BY CHARLES MACKAY. SHINE brightly through her casement, sun; Good morrow to those lustrous eyes, |