—many a time have these used the Poor Law
Board as an instrument against those anxious
for humanity to the poor. Besides, if all I hear
be true, the Board itself is as mythical as its
influence for good. Keep quiet, avoid disturbance,
and consequent unpopularity. Don't rouse
people against us and make a renewal of the bill
under which we claim our comfortable salaries
impossible—those have been the outspoken
tenets of the Board.'" "Is it possible," we
asked, "that successive Home Secretaries, the
Presidents of the Council, and their colleagues in
the Cabinet, can have been so mean-spirited and
base?"  "Not at all. But these high functionaries
are only the sham board. The Poor Law
Board potential is made up of the secretary and
one or two colleagues. These are the men upon
whom the responsibility of past and present
policy rests. The parliamentary secretaries and
the president are helplessly in their hands; and
it is notorious in which direction the strings
have been pulled. Let us have a succinct statement
of what these paid advisers have done for
the poor or for the country in the years during
which they have drawn the public money; and
let us hear why the secretariat complained of
by one Poor Law President, Mr. Matthew
Baines, as 'too large,' has been considerably
increased since his time."

If it be true that the secretary of this precious
department is its real chief, let us have the fact
made known to parliament and to the country,
and responsibility properly awarded. There is
neither merit nor justice in making a particular
workhouse or a particular official the scapegoat
of the rest—unless it be in the hope of reforming
all. The rank abuses which are inseparable
from the system must be traced to their source,
and a righteous control established, to which
both careless or corrupt guardians and supine
officials must bend. Purging Whitehall may
prove to be the only mode of securing wholesome
workhouses, and healthily active boards.

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.
EARTHQUAKES.

WE move upon the surface of the globe, as a
humorist who was also a philosopher once
observed, knowing no more of its central contents
than flies do of what is inside a Woolwich shell
over which they crawl. There is fire, we know,
because Vesuvius, Stromboli, and other volcanoes,
are so many furnace-doors, occasionally
open, through which we see the gushes of
flame. There is an explosive and destructive
power, too, offspring of those terrible passions
into which that great dumb monster, the earth,
sometimes breaks, to the horror and destruction
of poor fragile humanity—offspring to
which we give the dreaded name of earthquakes.

A certain fantastic old thinker about the
cosmogomy, who considered the earth to be a huge
living animal, bristled with forests, encrusted
with mountains, and speckled with oceans and
lakes, would no doubt have really believed our
metaphor to be a solid fact. He would have
affirmed that earthquakes were really the
shudderings of a vast megalosaurus, as he blunderingly
laboured to rise from his long trance.
There have been, as we know, great astronomers
who have asserted the sun to be a world
on fire, a glowing, vast, red-hot asbestos, coal
in the heavens, at once a beacon, a furnace, a
fireplace, and a huge central aërial chandelier
to the system it focuses. Other star-
gazers have assured us that the moon is a
burnt-out world—a great cinder of lakes and
mountains, now nearly all named and surveyed,
and lit only by reflexion from our planet.
Men signally wise in extracting sunbeams from
cucumbers, and in trying to gauge the infinite
with a pint cup, have assured audiences that
perpetual motion was possible, because our earth
is an example of the great opprobrium of science
being solved —the sea being a moving weight
that perpetually overbalances the wheel ot the
world, and keeps it spinning on in space.

But, alas! poor humanity has its limitation.
The eye of the finite being can only look a mile
or two into the darkness of the earth's surface;
no cable, no lead-line of the wisest science, has
ever yet drawn up anything but silence and
darkness from the central caves of that probably
explosive shell—the earth we live in.
Earthquakes come, and earthquakes go, and
puzzle us for ever. The destructive influence
of hurricanes and earthquakes is at present as
inscrutable to science as that endless problem of
theologists, the origin of evil. "Men," says
Richter, "rear pyramids, and try to build for
eternal duration; but the great Shaper of the
world seems to have inserted into our globe's
ingredients the elements of its future destruction.
The world is, in fact, a live shell, with a time-
match in it, which is burning slowly in its socket."

Among the greatest earthquakes of modern
times, that at Lima, on the 28th of October,
1746, stands pre-eminent, as it also extended
to Callao, and eighteen thousand persons
perished among the ruins. This convulsion,
which spread along the coast one hundred
leagues to the north and one hundred to the
south, began about half-past ten at night. The
noise, the shock, and the ruin took place in the
space of only four minutes. The day being
one dedicated to St. Simon and St. Jude, the
people of Lima attributed to the agency of
those saints the fact that only eighteen
thousand persons perished out of a population
of fifty thousand. Vast quantities of gold,
silver, and jewels were buried among the
seventy-four churches and the fourteen
monasteries. A great many nuns perished, and
seventy sick persons were killed in one hospital
alone. The public fountains were buried, the
statues of the Spanish kings crushed, and the
streets barricaded with fallen houses. As for
Callao, it was utterly destroyed, and even
its very shape changed by huge heaps of sand
and gravel. At the moment of the
earthquake, the sea rose mountains high, and rolled
on till it buried the city, and destroyed everything,