The pen is sharp and cuts like a knife,--but it is the surgeon's knife, not the poisoned barb of a foreigner's taunt.

This is the hopeful and promising aspect of these delineations and denunciations of the laboring man's condition.

That low, damp, ill-ventilated, contracted room in which he pens his family at night, was, quite likely, constructed in the days of Good Queen Bess, or when "George the Third was King," at the latest.

And houses were built for good, substantial farmers in those days which they would hardly house their horses in now.

There are hundreds of mechanics and day-laborers in Edinburgh who pen their families nightly in apartments once owned and occupied by Scotch dukes and earls, but which a journeyman shoemaker of New England would be loth to live in rent free.