workpeople, whose necessities drove them to his warehouse, and he seemed to think that the certainty of his work and of his pay justified him in adopting a scale of prices, governed solely by the alternative, which he knew to exist of employment on his own terms, or the humiliating and precarious resource of the parish. This he called availing himself of the state of the labour market, nor had he ever thought it necessary to enquire whether the wages which he paid procured either comforts or necessities for those who toiled for him. They came to him for work and knew his prices-they were free either to accept or reject it; and as long as he was erowded with applicants on his own terms, he had been too pleasantly occupied in counting his own profits, to calculate for a moment on their possible privation and suffering.

LIFE ASSURANCE.

THERE is no subject which occupies the public mind to a greater extent than Life Assurance, and certainly no subject promises so fairly to become one of great and permanent interest to communities growing hourly in enlightenment and comprehensive policy. Science has been brought to calculate its chances. Experience, with its gray sobriety, tests the truth of all its principles; and the wisdom of a maturer age fosters and encourages its practice and extension. Indeed, he must be but a tyro in the great school of Political Economy who failed to recognize the power of Life Assurance as an auxiliary in the consideration of order, and as one of the stoutest bulwarks against attacks upon the constitutional fabric. No journal or periodical can pretend to advocate the "Commonwealth" who fails to perceive, or is slow to appreciate, the manifold advantages incidental to a proper comprehension and extensive practice of the principles of Life Assu rance. Impressed with these views, it is our intention to exhibit from time to time the most prominent and attractive features of the system. It may seem strange to persons who have for years

perhaps heard the subject mentioned in their own circles, to find that Life Assurance is comparatively still in its early infancy; that out of 16,000,000 of persons, little more than a quarter of a million have, up to the present time, availed themselves of its benefits; and of these more than one-third are policies effected for business purposes, and not from provident motives. But, as we said before, a new impetus seems to have been given to the practice of Assurance, now the middle and industrious classes begin to comprehend the calculations and to appreciate the advantages, whilst hitherto few but the higher classes understood the system, and adapted it to suit their views and wants.

Independently of the great and primary motive of Assurance, arising as it does from the best, the purest, and the holiest of human affections,-independently of the habits of forethought and prudence which it is sought by the principle to inculcate--the practice of Life Assurance is becoming one of great commercial moment. There are few mercantile transactions of an extensive character that do not require and call to their aid the practice of Assurance. Partnership, marriage-settlements, bankruptcies, loans extended, credits, mortgages, reversions, renewal of leases determinable on lives, and various others too numerous to mention, are daily effected by such means and we are confidently of opinion that but little time will elapse before Life Assurance, whether regarded with a view to commercial or prudent objects, will be far more extensively adopted to the various wants of every-day life than it has ever yet been; and that all those lesser combinations, such as benefit clubs and others, slips as they are of the parent stock, which now call so loudly for revision, will emerge into and become part of the more solid, respectable, and better regulated Life Assurance Institutions. Our first care will be, however, to glance at the beneficial effects of Life Assurance, properly so called, as it affects the masses of mankind, and materially enhances the prospect of happiness to the human family.

A MANAGER.

THE SPELLING REFORM.

BY ONE OF THE PITMANS.
(Concluded from page 54.)

Is it not a fact, that an immense number of children who attend our public schools, even for several years, go away unable to read with any degree of freedom? And is it not equally true that to acquire the arts of reading and writing (which, after all, are no part of education, properly so called, but only instruments wherewith to obtain it) is a labour of many years? The reason of this is that our time-honoured alphabet of twenty-six letters is miserably defective (though it seems almost sacrilege to meddle with it), and words are spelt in a manner almost to defy the skill of youth in discovering their proper pronunciation. Nothing is clearer than the fact that the sound of a word ought to be gathered from its spelling; the avowed object of alphabetic writing, when it superseded the hieroglyphic method, was to represent the sounds of words by written characters. But did you ever, reader, hear a child spell the word l-o-v-e, and then ask why move should not be pronounced in the same way, and not moove; and afterwards, perhaps, inquire, in a state of innocent perplexity, whether r-o-v-e should be Sounded ruv or roove? The various sounds of the o in these words love, move, rove, (and these are not half the sounds represented by this letter, witness, word, woman, women, on,) furnish a tolerable illustration of the difficulty of learning to read. Each of the vowels in our alphabet represent several different sounds, varying from five to eight or nine in number; and wherever any vowel occurs the child has to remember its particular sound in that particular place-not being allowed to reason by analogy, and pronounce it as sounded in other cases. There is not a single letter in the alphabet, vowel or consonant, invariably used to represent the same sound wherever it occurs, and the pronunciation, therefore, of almost every word must, as we have said, be studied and remembered individually. A person who had learned to call eight "ait," would naturally call height hait" (as is the case with many persons in Yorkshire and other counties);

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and if told it was "hight" (like the adjective 'high"), would wonder, with regard to weight, whether it was "wait," or "wight!" Thousands upon thousands of these anomalies are to be found in the English language; and it is solely owing to the existence of such contradictions and perplexities that the infantine mind is so puzzled and bewildered. The first step which a child takes in learning should be smooth and easy, so that it may be gradually prepared for the more difficult studies to be subsequently encountered; whereas it is rugged and difficult-in many cases disheartening. We have heard of instances of adults who have spent hour upon hour, week upon week, month upon month, in endeavouring to master the art of reading, and were compelled at last to give it up in despair, although they brought the most willing minds to the task; and we have heard of such, too, who, on betaking themselves to the new system, have been as delighted as they were before disgusted, and have found reading as easy as they before found it perplexing.

The plan of the new method, or phonotypy, is to spell every word according to its sound. This is done by providing a symbol for every sound in the language, each symbol representing but one sound, each sound being represented by but one symbol. Thus, learning to read is only learning the letters; and as each letter has its distinct sound wherever it occurs, there can be no difficulty in pronouncing the longest combination, or the most awkwardly sounding word. The phonotypic letters are about forty in number; nearly all the ordinary Roman letters have been used for the sounds they most frequently represent in the " old system (as the spelling reformers sometimes prospectively call it), and new letters have been introduced for the additional sounds.

A

person acquainted with the present or Romanic system might learn to read by the new method in five or ten minutes; and a few weeks' study by a person totally unacquainted with reading, would, in most cases, be sufficient to enable him to read as well as by a twelvemonth's study on the present plan.

It is gratifying to know that the spelling reform has its advocates in all parts of the kingdom. In some places phono

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS. How eloquent are the flowers! As the psalmist said of the stars on high, so may we say of these stars of earth: "There is in them no speech nor language, yet their voice is not unheard." Since the dew of the first morning rested upon them amid the groves of Paradise, they have been whispering their sweet counsels of love and beauty in the ears of man-and yet they are not silent. Year by year, as they come forth to adorn the everchanging links of the rolling seasons, they bring with them fresh messages from that spirit-land, whose glories seem at times well-nigh bursting through their bright etherial forms. Gentle poets and prophets are they; poets, by virtue of their mission to interpret the beautiful to the eye of man; and prophets, inasmuch as they prefigure, as they come forth one by one, from their dark winter sleep in the bosom of earth, to light and life and joy, that great mystery of our nature, that we, too "shall not sleep but be changed."

Surely, if there is, in the "glorious apparelling" of this outward world, one thing more than another, which speaks of the love of God, it is the flowers; it is a perfect hymn of love and praise that is written on the furrowed page of earth with these lovely hieroglyphics at first pale and trembling and delicate, as the first unfolding of a tale of affection; then deepening, month by month, in fervency and luxuriance; and again sinking away, like the vanishing hues of the rainbow, or the last melting touching strains of an Æolian melody.

The Flowers have a high and holy mission to fulfil; humble, but appointed servitors are they in the vast Cathedral of Nature, consecrated and ordained by none other than the Great High Priest Himself, in that hour wherein He looked upon them arrayed in a glory greater than that of Solomon, and gave them a gospel to preach, to all generations of men, a gospel of love and trusting faith, and the assured belief to man, that

"Whoso careth for the flowers, Will much more care for him.' "9 The lonely traveller in the far off wilds of Africa is but a type of the myriads of human spirits that have drunk refreshment and consolation from these way-side fountains, that have listened to the ministry of these lowly preachers, and have gone on their way rejoicing.

Who has not felt, in contemplating the vastness of creation, in standing upon the very portals of the Infinite, and following the mighty hosts of Heaven in their unimaginable multitudes and wanderings-in gazing

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into those abysses of space, where the torch of science serves but to make the darkness, visible, a sensation of fearful and heartcrushing awe, a sense of weakness, and littleness, and insignificance, like that which actuated the Poet-king of Israel to exclaim, "Lord what is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him?" It is in such moments as these, that the breath of the lowly flowers floats over the soul, like a waft from the other world;-it is then that we listen most willingly to the sound of their holy Evangel;

and, as our sinking eyes turn from the crushing grandeurs of starry Heavens to the turf beneath our feet, these heaven-sent messengers are there, to assure us, by the hoards of loveliness lavished upon their fairy forms, and the delicate perfection of their organization, that our poor notions of great and small bear no relation to Infinitude, that they exist not in the workings of the Eternal Order, that they are among the many shadows that will flee away at the dawning of Everlasting Day; and that, if the testimony of our Father's might is written in burning cyphers on the firmament of Heaven, the message of His boundless and all embracing love, is as clearly told and as gladly accepted from the gleaming pages of the grassy earth.

And many a blessed lesson, besides these great ones, do the flowers teach to the willing and lowly mind that can stoop with child-like simplicity to learn of these gentle teachers. To some submitted souls, they have breathed forth great secrets of the Spirit World: they have become transparent with the radiance of their hidden and spiritual essence, and have stood before them, transfigured into the shining glory of those thoughts of God of which they are the symbols, and the visible language, and embodiments. These have gazed upon them "with thoughts too deep for tears," because their delicate forms have been too thin a

veil to hide from them the radiance of that in-dwelling in-forming spirit of the Universe which is the life and soul of nature. Thus every separate flower has its own truth to tell, besides forming an harmonious part of the great whole; and though the more ærial notes of the music they breathe may be heard alone by deeply spiritualized natures, yet they have tones of solemn sweetness loud enough for all but the dullest ear to hear. Who can look on the snowdrop and the violet without thinking of spotless purity and modest virtue; on the daisy, without remembering the numberless mercies that gladden our path of life, unacknowledged and almost unseen, which would yet be sorely missed were they to de