from him, and society, and liberty; but he feeds and clothes him, and keeps him out of mischief; and when he has convinced him, by force and reason together, that this life is for his good, he turns him out upon the world a reformed man, and as confident of the success of his handy-work, as the shoemaker of that which he has just taken off the last, or the Parisian barber in Sterne, of the buckle of his wig.  “Dip it in the ocean,” said the perruquier, “and it will stand!” But we doubt the durability of our projector’s patchwork.  Will our convert to the great principle of Utility work when he is from under Mr. Bentham’s eye, because he was forced to work when under it?  Will he keep sober, because he has been kept from liquor so long?  Will he not return to loose company, because he has had the pleasure of sitting vis-a-vis with a philosopher of late?  Will he not steal, now that his hands are untied?  Will he not take the road, now that it is free to him?  Will he not call his benefactor all the names he can set his tongue to, the moment his back is turned?  All this is more than to be feared.  The charm of criminal life, like that of savage life, consists in liberty, in hardship, in danger, and in the contempt of death, in one word, in extraordinary excitement; and he who has tasted of it, will no more return to regular habits of life, than a man will take to water after drinking brandy, or than a wild beast will give over hunting its prey.  Miracles never cease, to be sure; but they are not to be had wholesale, or to order.  Mr. Owen, who is another of these proprietors and patentees of reform, has lately got an American savage with him, whom he carries about in great triumph and complacency, as an antithesis to his New View of Society, and as winding up his reasoning to what it mainly wanted, an epigrammatic point.  Does the benevolent visionary of the Lanark cotton-mills really think this natural man will act as a foil to his artificial man?  Does he for a moment imagine that his Address to the higher and middle classes, with all its advantages of fiction, makes any thing like so interesting a romance as Hunter’s Captivity among the North American Indians? Has he any thing to shew, in all the apparatus of New Lanark and its desolate monotony, to excite the thrill of imagination like the blankets made of wreaths of snow under which the wild wood-rovers bury themselves for weeks in winter?  Or the skin of a leopard, which our hardy adventurer slew, and which served him for great coat and bedding?  Or the rattle-snake that he found by his side as a bedfellow?  Or his rolling himself into a ball to escape from him?  Or his suddenly placing himself against a tree to avoid being trampled to death by the herd of wild buffaloes, that came rushing on like the sound of thunder?  Or his account of the huge spiders that prey on bluebottles and gilded flies in green pathless forests; or of the great Pacific Ocean, that the natives look upon as the gulf that parts time from eternity, and that is to waft them to the spirits of their fathers?  After all this, Mr. Hunter must find Mr. Owen and his parallellograms trite and flat, and will, we suspect, take an opportunity to escape from them!