to do?" The old man had diligently studied "Poor Richard's Almanac," and, proceeding to give his advice, he based his counsels upon the sentences and proverbs with which for many years the almanac had been garnished. He gave utterance to a very weighty truth, when in the exordium of his sermon, he said, "The taxes laid on by Government are very heavy, but we are taxed twice as much by our idleness-three times as much by our pride-and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement." There is a self-imposed taxation, of which we seldom think, but a taxation of enormous magnitude. If all men were industrious and steady, the poor-rate would scarcely amount to a farthing in the pound, and that great palace of indolence, the almshouse, would immediately be "to be let." The enormous expense of police and prisons is, every farthing of it, a self-imposed tax, a part of the price which we have to pay for sin. Those most costly establishments, the army and navy, could be dispensed with, and as a matter of course would be dispensed with, if all nations were wise enough, and virtuous enough, to abandon, by common consent, the exceedingly unprofitable game of war. Consider, too, how heavily people tax themselves in order to keep up a grand appearance; reflect upon the innumerable extravagances of luxury; it is one of the crying evils of the age, that great numbers of people are not content to live within their incomes; "they spend the Michaelmas rent in the Midsummer moon;" they are impatient of the least restraint upon their expensive tastes; every man tries to outshine his neighbor, not in

virtue, but in vain and vulgar grandeur. Only think how heavily many persons tax themselves in the one article, or rather, I should say, the one department, of dress; they are so infatuated as to think that it is a certain style of dress that makes the gentleman or the lady; the tailor can make a gentleman of any "snob," the milliner can transform into a lady, a woman who never in her life was guilty of uttering one sentence of correct English. Omnipotent tailors! Who shall utter again that ancient calumny, which alleges that it takes nine of you to make a man, whereas the deliberate belief and affirmation of this age of progress is, that any one of you can make any number of gentlemen? In eating and drinking, too, there is a heavy, self-imposed taxation; there are many, it is true, who can scarcely secure the necessaries of existence, but thousands who must have luxuries at any price, and have so habituated themselves to them, that the slightest self-denial would be intolerable. At one time, there were sumptuary laws which regulated every man's dress, and presided over every man's table; we do not wish to see those foolish old statutes revived, but their principle was good; it was just this: that every man should cut his coat according to his cloth;" that every man should live as he can honestly, and not dishonestly, afford to live; let every man enact and enforce his own sumptuary laws, and he will free himself from much heavy and unnecessary taxation, and find that it is possible to live, and to live with comfort too, even when "the times" are nothing to boast of.

"Poor Richard's" commentator is down upon the idle folk; and very properly; he will not tolerate idle

Then do not squander

ness; "Dost thou love life? time, for that is the stuff life is made of." There is much time squandered; most men certainly work six days in the week, when work is to be had; but it is often considered a great hardship to be obliged to labor thus from day to day. The toiling millions are often represented as objects of pity. Now, this is all nonsense; what else should men do? How can they employ their time better than in work? The man who has no work is the man who claims our pity. Some, undoubtedly, have to work too hard, their hours of labor are protracted to an extent injurious to health, and detrimental to intellectual culture and moral elevation; but ten or twelve hours a day for six days in the week, will injure no one, but will most decidedly do him a great deal of good. "The stuff that life is made of" is most shamefully squandered; morning quarters lost; evenings spent in no useful pursuit; hours and half hours-no end of them thrown away; fifty-two Sundays in the year, a full seventh portion of our time, which might be consecrated to the highest purposes; in many cases no satisfactory account can be rendered of such days, but an account very unsatisfactory, and one which will not bear reflection. We have not many holidays, it is true, but the few we have are generally squandered in dissipation. People complain of the shortness of life, but it strikes me that life is quite long enough, considering how it is usually spent. You talk about the value of human life, and human life is valuable; but still, if we are to estimate life by its utility, it may be worth one's while to enquire whether there are not many horses, asses, and

dogs, whose loss would be more severely felt than the loss of here and there a member of the human family. We have a most singular expression, to this effect, "killing time;" this I think shows that, short as life is, it is longer than many people well know what to do with; "killing time." Time, then, is something which we dislike, something which under certain circumstances, we feel to be oppressive and painful, therefore let us kill it. The same mournful fact appears in our word "pastime ;" we want something that shall cause the time to pass by unobserved; we wish time to steal away, we wish it to get on faster. Time is capital, but with many it is capital lying dead and unprofitable. My friends, do not squander this precious "stuff of which life is made;" study and ascertain well the purposes for which it has been given the secular and spiritual purposes of this brief life, and husband every moment carefully, applying it wisely and well.

There is much truth in this saying of "Poor Richard" -"Many without labor would live by their wits only, but they break for want of stock." You see this illustrated in the lives of gamblers, in the lives of schemers; such men seldom get on, with all their cunning; there is very little doubt that this is true of those scoundrels whose vocation is to deceive and to rob poor emigrants, and who are a disgrace and a curse to this town-a nuisance by all means to be put down, if possible. I don't believe that the trade of a crimp, or a landshark, or a mancatcher, is profitable after all. Have faith in honest work; there is more to be got by it than by cunning or knavery of any kind; it is of course infinitely preferable

on moral grounds-it is also far preferable upon merely secular grounds.

"He that hath a trade hath an estate; and he that hath a calling hath an office of profit and honor," says "Poor Richard." So the man who has a trade is not very badly off, he has no reason to complain of his lot; he has no landed property perhaps, but he has a property in his skill and his labor, which may be much more valuable than a considerable number of acres. But let him regard his calling as an office of honor too; work, however looked down upon by the people who cannot perform it, is essentially an honorable thing; it may not be very profitable, but honorable it always is; there's nothing to be ashamed of in it; the man who has reason to be ashamed is the man who does nothing: let the coxcomb be ashamed of his kid gloves, but never let a man who works be ashamed of his hard hands: a hammer is a much more honorable implement than a gold-headed cane; and a man hard at work, with his shirt sleeves turned up, is a great deal better worth seeing than a dandy dressed in his best "bib and tucker."

Honor and shame from no condition rise,

Act well your part, there all the honor lies!''

"If we are industrious," says "Poor Richard's" commentator, we shall never starve, for at the working man's house hunger looks in but dares not enter." I am afraid that in saying this, we say rather too much; I do not think it is in the power of every working man to keep the wolf from the door, or even to prevent his coming into the house. The unskilled laborer, in particular,