When the scheme for the erection of baths for the working classes was first promulgated here, we individually subscribed our pittance, and predicted its failure--and for this reason: The plan could not stand by itself. To make a labourer, at the end of the day’s or the week’s work, as clean and fresh as soap and hot-water, with all appliances and means to boot, could make him, and send him to encounter in his own dwelling and vicinity the filth and the odours of a pig-stye, was not a very feasible proposition. But personal purification would induce household tidiness. It might do so, if ventilation and drainage and space were all at his command, and within his regulation. If they were not, in what a hopeless contest he engaged! Invisible demons, on whose invulnerable crests all his blows fell harmlessly, whose subtlety no precaution on his part could exclude, and to whose potency his own lustrations only made his senses more acute, would speedily quench his new-born ardour, and probably seduce him back to the persuasion, that for one in his position the truth lay in the proverb--“The clartier the cosier.” We must also give him the benefit of those data which political economists never refuse to any body--a prolific wife and numerous progeny. A clean house of one room, open to the incursions and excursions of seven or eight children, whose playground is the Cowgate, or, let it be the shores--that is, the common sewers--of the Water of Leith, is a tolerably desperate speculation. Thither, however, our operative, radiant from his abstersion, is doomed to repair, that he may be affronted by the muddy embraces of his infants, and oppressed by the fragrance of his home. The project of the baths, simply as such, although excellent in its spirit, and true in its tendency, could not, we repeat our belief, have been productive, as an isolated effort, of material or ending benefit. Much must go hand in hand, and step by step, with it. Ventilation and drainage, and more ample elbow-room, are indispensible to carry us forward successfully in the momentous progress on which we are, earnestly, we hope, entering towards the amelioration of the people. Nor shall we hesitate to affirm, that no system of education can be satisfactory or complete, which shall not at least endeavour to provide some means for extricating the offspring of the lower classes in their tender years, when the superintendence of father or mother is almost an impossibility for a great portion of the day, out of the causeway and the dunghill, and if not absolutely to put them in the way of good, at all events effectually to keep them out of the way of harm.