The bane and antidote of England is her immense manufacturing power—the faculty that enables her to inundate, the whole habitable globe with the products of her industry, is at once the source of her prosperity and poverty—her millionaire mill-owners and her impoverished thousands. Never was the skill of machinery pushed to the same wonderful—never the results of mechanical invention so astoundingly developed. Men, are but the presiding genii over the wonder-working slaves of their creative powers, and the child, is the volition that gives impulse to the giant force of a mighty engine. Subdivision of labour, carried to an extent almost incredible, has facilitated despatch, and induced a higher degree of excellence in every branch of mechanism—human ingenuity is racked, chemical analysis investigated, mathematical research explored—and all, that Mr. Binns, of Birmingham, may make thirteen minikin pins—while Mr. Sims, of Stockport, has been making but twelve. Let him but succeed in this, and straightway his income is quadrupled—his eldest son is member for a manufacturing borough, his second is a cornet in the Life Guards—his daughter, with a fortune of one hundred thousand pounds, is married to the heir of a marquisate—and his wife, soaring above the murky atmosphere of the factory, breathes the purer air of western London, and advertises her soirees in the Morning Post. The pursuit of wealth is now the grand characteristic of our age and country; and the headlong race of money-getting seems the great feature of the day. To this end the thundering steamer ploughs the white-crested wave of the broad Atlantic—to this end the clattering locomotive darts through the air at sixty miles the hour—for this, the thousand hammers of the foundry, the ten thousand wheels of the factory are at work—and man, toiling like a galley-slave, scarce takes time to breathe in his mad career, as with straining eyeballs and outstretched hands, he follows in the pursuit of lucre.

Now, men are imitative creatures; and strange enough, too, they are oftentimes disposed from the indulgence of the faculty to copy things, and adapt them to purposes very foreign to their original destination. This manufacturing speed, this steeple-chase of printed calico and Paisley wear, is all very well while it is limited to the districts where it began.

That two hundred and seventy thousand white cotton night-caps, with a blue tassel on every one of them, can be made in twenty-four hours at Messrs. Twist and Tredlem's factory, is a very gratifying fact, particularly to all who indulge in ornamental headgear—but we see no reason for carrying this dispatch into the Court of Chancery, and insisting that every nod of the woolsack is to decide a suit at law. Yet have the lawyer and the physician both adopted the impetuous practices of the manufacturing world, and Haste, red haste! is now the cry.

Lord Brougham's Chancery practice was only to be equalled by one of Lord Waterford's steeple-chases. He took all before him in a fly—he rode straight, plenty of neck, baulked nothing—up leap or down leap, sunk fence or double ditch, post and rail, or quickset, stone wall, or clay bank, all one to him—go it he would. Others might deny his judgment; he wanted to get over the ground, and that he did do.

The West-end physician, in the same way, visits his fifty patients daily, walks his hospital, delivers a lecture to old ladies about some “curious provision” of nature in the palm of the human hand (for fee-taking); and devoting something like three minutes and twelve seconds to each sick man's case, pockets some twenty thousand per annum by his dispatch.

Speed is now the El Dorado. Jelly is advertised to be made in a minute, butter in five, soup seasoned and salted in three seconds of time. Even the Quakers—bless their quiet hearts!—could n't escape the contagion and actually began to walk and talk with some faint resemblance to ordinary mortals. The church alone maintained the even tenor of its way, and moved not in the wild career of the whirlwind world about it. Such was my gratulation, when my eye fell upon the following passage of the Times. Need I say with what a heavy heart I read it? It is Mr. Rushton who speaks:—

“In the month of December, 1841, he heard that a man had been found dead in the streets of Liverpool; that all the property he possessed had been taken from his person, and that an attempt to trace his identity had been made in vain. He was taken to the usual repository for the dead, where au inquest had been held upon him, and from the 'dead house,' as it was called, he was removed to the workhouse burial-ground. The man who drove the hearse on the occasion was very old, and not very capable of giving evidence. His attendant was an idiot. It had been represented to Mr. Hodgson and himself that the dead man had been taken in the clothes in which he died and put into a coffin which was too small for him; that a shroud was put over him; that the lid of the coffin would not go down; and that he was taken from the dead-house and buried in the parochial ground, no funeral rites having been performed on the occasion. It had also been communicated to Mr. Hodgson and himself that, after two days, the clergyman who was instructed to perform those rites over the paupers, came and performed one service for the dead over all the paupers who had been buried in the intermediate time.”

Now, without stopping to criticise the workhouse equipage, which appears to be driven by a man too old to speak, with an idiot for his companion; nor even to advert to the scant ceremony of burying a man in his daily dress, and in a coffin that would not close on him—what shall we say of the “patent parson power” that buries paupers in detachments, and reads the service over platoons of dead? The reverend chaplain feeling the uncertainty of human life, and knowing how frail is our the to existence, waits in the perfect conviction of a large party before he condescends to appear. Knowing that dead men tell no tales, he surmises also that they don't run away, and so he says to himself—these people are not pressed for time, they 'll be here when I come again—it is a sickly season, and we 'll have a field-day on Saturday. Cheap soup for the poor, says Mrs. Fry. Cheap justice, says O'Connell. Cheap clothing, says a tailor who makes new clothes from old, with a machine called a devil—but cheap burial is the boast of the Liverpool chaplain, and he is the most original among them.