postmaster, and satisfactorily performed their duties. He also undertook large contracts for supplying the commissariat, which he conducted with advantage to the army and profit to himself. After about ten years' unremitting labor, he returned to England with a competency; and one of his first acts was to make provision for the poorer members of his family.

III.33

But Joseph Hume was not a man idly to enjoy the fruits of his industry; indeed, work and occupation were necessary for his comfort and happiness. To make himself fully acquainted with the actual state of his own country and the condition of the people, he visited every town in the United Kingdom which enjoyed any degree of manufacturing celebrity. Afterwards he travelled abroad, gathering a store of experience of men andstates. Returned to England, he entered Parliament in 1812, and continued a member of that assembly, with a short interruption, for a period of about thirty-four years. His first recorded speech was on the subject of public education, and throughout his long and honorable career he took an active and earnest interest in that and all other questions calculated to elevate and improve the condition of the people,—criminal reform, savings-banks, free-trade, economy and retrenchment, extended representation, and such like measures, all of which he indefatigably promoted. Whatever subject he undertook, he worked at with all his might. He was not a good speaker, but what he said was believed to proceed from the lips of an honest, single-minded, accurate man. If ridicule, as Shaftesbury says, be the test