TO WORKING MEN.

IT behoves every journalist, at this time
when the memory of an awful pestilence is
fresh among us, and its traces are visible at
every turn in various affecting aspects of
poverty and desolation, which any of us can
see who are not purposely blind, to warn his
readers, whatsoever be their ranks and conditions,
that unless they set themselves in
earnest to improve the towns in which they
live, and to amend the dwellings of the poor,
they are guilty, before GOD, of wholesale
murder.

The best of our journals have so well
remembered their responsibility in this
respect, and have so powerfully presented the
truth to the general conscience, that little
remains to be written on the urgent subject.
But we would carry a forcible appeal made
by our contemporary The Times to the
working people of England a little further,
and implore them—with a view to their
future avoidance of a fatal old mistake
—to beware of being led astray from their
dearest interests, by high political authorities
on the one hand, no less than by sharking
mountebanks on the other.  The noble lord,
and the right honorable baronet, and the
honorable gentleman, and the honorable and
learned gentleman, and the honorable and
gallant gentleman, and the whole of the
honorable circle, have, in their contests for
place, power, and patronage, loaves and fishes,
distracted the working man's attention from
his first necessities, quite as much as the
broken creature—once a popular Misleader—
who is now sunk in hopeless idiotcy in a
madhouse. To whatsoever shadows these
may offer in lieu of substances, it is now the
first duty of The People to be resolutely
blind and deaf; firmly insisting, above all
things, on their and their children's right to
every means of life and health that
Providence has afforded for all, and firmly refusing
to allow their name to be taken in vain for
any purpose, by any party, until their homes
are purified and the amplest means of
cleanliness and decency are secured to them.

We may venture to remark that this most
momentous of all earthly questions is one we
are not now urging for the first time. Long
before this Journal came into existence, we
systematically tried to turn Fiction to the
good account of showing the preventible
wretchedness and misery in which the mass
of the people dwell, and of expressing again
and again the conviction, founded upon
observation, that the reform of their habitations
must precede all other reforms; and
that without it, all other reforms must fail.
Neither Religion nor Education will make
in any way, in this nineteenth century of
Christianity, until a Christian government
shall have discharged its first obligation, and
secured to the people Homes, instead of
polluted dens.

Now, any working man of common intelligence
knows perfectly well, that one session
of parliament zealously devoted to this
object would secure its attainment. If he do
not also know perfectly well that a
government or a parliament will of itself
originate nothing to save his life, he may
know it by instituting a very little inquiry.
Let him inquire what either power has done
to better his social condition, since the last great
outbreak of disease five years ago. Let him
inquire what amount of attention from
government, and what amount of attendance
in parliament, the question of that condition
has ever attracted, until one night in this
last August, when it became a personal question
and a facetious question, and when LORD
SEYMOUR, the member for Totnes, exhibited
his fitness for ever having been placed at the
head of a great public department by cutting
jokes, which were received with laughter, on
the subject of the pestilence then raging. If
the working man, on such a review of plain
facts, be satisfied that without his own help
he will not be helped, but will be pitilessly
left to struggle at unnatural odds with
disease and death; then let him bestir
himself to set so monstrous a wrong right, and let
him—for the time at least—dismiss from his
mind all other public questions, as straws in
the balance. The glorious right of voting for
Lord This (say Seymour, for instance) or Sir
John That; the intellectual state of Abyssinia;
the endowment of the College of
Maynooth; the paper duty; the newspaper
duty; the five per cent; the twenty-five per
cent; the ten thousand hobby-horses that
are exercised before him, scattering so much
dust in his eyes that he cannot see his own