enterprise excluded by the operation of settlements, to which we know many parallels, to tell the people that it is their fault if they have not employment at mill-spinning like their neighbours, when the law stops the erection of mills.'1 Lord Dufferin himself has expressed a conviction that were it not for the agitation which now scares capital from its shores, and prevents the development of her industrial resources, Ireland might be rendered capable of sustaining a population far larger than it has ever borne.' But the same noble lord, referring to certain ancient restrictions on commerce and manufactures, says:

Would you see what Ireland might have been, go to Belfast. Would you ascertain how the numerical strength of a nation may be multiplied, go to Belfast: where, within a single generation, the population has quadrupled, and the wages of labour have more than doubled.

We have gone to Belfast, and traversing its quarters have many times passed through a long, dismal, decaying suburban street, bordered by waste ground, which reminded us, by its contrast with the life and riches of the rest of the town, of an historian's remark upon the valley of the Nile: Even in the valley itself, the separation of the fruitful land from the solitary waste is distinctly seen the empire of life borders on the empire of death.' On investigating the causes of this contrast we were not remitted back to ancient and non-existing restrictions upon trade. During the very generation in which the population of the rest of Belfast has quadrupled, while individual wealth has more than doubled (which it never would have done but for an Act of Parliament that made the ground they occupy an instrument of production for a commercial commu

;

nity instead of the instrument of political power for a single proprietor, as it had previously been), the unbuilt part of the suburb referred to has been the subject of a protracted lawsuit between that same proprietor and another noble while the part which is occupied by decaying and ruinous houses belongs at present to a third great proprietor (with reversion to one of the two others), who cannot give a lease of sufficient length to tempt builders. A part of this very suburb, in which perpetual interests could be purchased, has been renovated like the rest of the town, and is the site of one of its principal enterprises.

We thus dismiss to the final may receptacle of what have been called sophismes économiques the theory that the rise in the price of labour proves and measures the benefit of A much emigration to Ireland. more rational criterion has been suggested by a judicious writer who distinguishes between the first flight of the famine-stricken victims of the potato disease, and the emigration in steamers of later years. Admitting the soundness of the distinction, we, however, include in one economic category of wasteful depopulation the whole exodus caused by obstacles to the development of the industrial resources of the island. The whole stream of emigration which flows from that source-from imprisoned natural wealth, from the legal insecurity of industrial enterprise and improvement-is a current of decline, not of progress; and it is among the grave mischiefs of the doctrines so sedulously dif fused respecting the advantage of emigration, that it misleads the mind of the public, and of the Irish proprietors to look for a cure of the evils of Ireland in one of the

VOL. LXXVII.-NO. CCCCLXI.

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results of their perpetuation. If the natural resources of Ireland had been made as accessible as those of America, in a cosmopolitan sense (though not necessarily in reference to the interests of Ireland or the United Kingdom even in that case), whatever emigration might have taken place, might be pronounced natural and beneficial. But so long as Ireland has natural resources undeveloped, and capital unemployed, through the state of the law, the departure of the flower of the population must be laid to the charge of the legislature as a calamity resulting from its neglect. 'The law is the same in England,' a legislator answers. The law of tenure is not the same, as a legislator ought to know; still less are the customs the same upon which the law in both islands is based. And it is upon a country with the calamitous history of Ireland that a legal system has been imposed, of which the results even in England are to be seen in the faces of its crowded city population, and of its degraded agricultural labourers. At the beginning of this article reference was made to the frequent confusion under a common name of different and even opposite phenomena, of industrial energy with the love of idle power under the names of private interest, or the desire of wealth, of the most unequal means of payment and unequal wages, under the denomination of an aggregate wages-fund, of demands which are not supplied along with demands which are, under the formula of demand and supply. We believe that candid readers of these pages will pronounce not only that the history of Ireland has been one long profligate waste of national resources of every kind, but that one of the most monstrous episodes in that history is the waste of industrial power, and of national strength which takes the name of

emigration, along with that widely different movement of industrial enterprise and colonising vigour which peoples and reclaims the waste places of the earth. On April 1, 1845 the population of Ireland was not far short of eight millions and a half; on April 1, 1868 it was little above five millions and a half; on April 1, 1871 there is reason to believe it will scarcely exceed the population of Belgium on little more than a third of the space.

So much the better, we have heard it said; Ireland ought to be a sheep-farm for England. And why not England a sheep-farm for France? as it perhaps might have become before now but for its overpopulated cities, and the mines in which its people can be packed under ground.

What must be the feeling of the exiled peasantry of Ireland at the other side of the Atlantic, when a grave American professor, in a treatise on the principles of political economy, speaks as follows of Irish emigration? The policy of English landlords is to depopulate their estates, to make the peasantry give place to flocks and herds as in the north of Scotland, or to compel them to emigrate to foreign lands as in Ireland. Thus they imitate the system which has been prac tised for centuries in the Roman Campagna, which reduced the fields of Italy in the age of Pliny to a desert, and subsequently surren dered them to the northern barbarians because there were not men enough to defend them.' The political instinct must be 'absent from the present generation, if it does not see the wrong which is being done to the next one-a wrong in the strictest economic sense as regards the loss of security as well as of industrial power.

Audiet pugnas vitio parentum Rara juventus.

T

HE MISSES QUHAIR were not the daughters of a sea-captain or mate, they were the daughters of a small farmer, who had laboured a few fields with his own hands, and kept a few cows to supply Oatness with dairy produce, at a house sufficiently detached from the humbler suburb beyond which it stood, to bear its own name of Sandycroft. Old Adam Quhair was gathered to his fathers, but his daughters were able to carry on his farming, depending, as it did, for its profits principally on successful dairy work. The Misses Quhair had the assistance of a servant-man to work their pair of horses, and their brother-in-law Aikenhead, the principal grocer or merchant, as the tradesman was called at Oatness, to dispose of their calves to the butcher, and occasionally to attend a cattle market on their behalf, and buy or sell a cow for its proper mistresses.

The Misses Quhair were of a douce age when such a plan of life became perfectly admissible. It was in force in several instances round Oatness. Widows or maiden ladies held the remainder of their husbands' or fathers' leases, or were allowed to enter on new 'tacks' by the landlords. One reads at a later date of women's work; here was work naturally finding itself for women, which seemed to fit them admirably, and which they conducted with credit and advantage. Sandycroft was a two-storied freestone house, with its small threshing mill built at one end, and its byre at the other, so that the Misses Quhair were in comfortable proximity to their offices. The approach was by a rugged road unbordered

by hedge or wall, leading through the pasture land or 'greens,' as a Scotch term designated it, where the cows were at grass. If the Misses Quhair had any visitors who came to them in wheeled carriages or on horseback, it must have been at the risk of their necks, for the road 'b' east' or 'b' wast the greens' had holes in it deep enough to take any horse not a giant up to the girths, and to sink wheels to the axle-trees. In rain or snow, b'east or b' wast, the greens was a very miry bit, even for foot passengers, but the Misses Quhair walked in 'extra stout' market shoes, kilted their gowns, wore short petticoats, and rarely went into the town, except for Saturday shopping or Sabbath kirking.

The house, mid-way on the primitive road, was totally unadorned save professionally. With a stolid disregard to what might have been considered comfortable and agreeable arrangements for its inhabitants, it had a northern exposure and no view of the sea. Such a garden as it possessed-a mere potato-field, with narrow borders of coarser vegetables, and chamomile, honesty, and a sweet, humble lily or rose in May and July, was behind the house and out of sight. The house in front was indebted to the Misses Quhair's business for everything which took it out of the category of such houses. It had from early spring to late autumn brown-backed, straw-colour lined milk dishes in double rows, and in various stages of dripping and drying, at each side of the door. These dishes decreased as the season waned, and dwindled to one or two in winter, but never wholly disappeared. At a certain

hour in the forenoon, three or four times a week in summer, there was put out for a similar airing a tall churn, innocent of the modern invention of fly-wheel, a long narrow box like a coffin on one end, with a stalk polished and frayed by use, which the Misses Quhair drove up and down to make the butter fly. The process was not so entirely mechanical and drudging, or so independent of skill, as it appeared. Sometimes even when Miss Quhair herself churned in too great a hurry, the catastrophe of a burst kirn' came to pass, and the Misses Quhair were constrained with many shamefaced apologies to sell to their complaining customers and their deriding brother-in-law a mass of soft white 'bursen butter," instead of their wonted firm buff produce. Alongside the open door, like a shield or Don Quixote's barber's bason, hung the milk strainer. Cheese formed a prominent feature in the details of Sandycroft. mer, during the day, cheese standing on end and lying on their sides, were displayed on the sill of the open dairy window and on a bench outside. There were cheeses-whey coloured, flesh-tinted, spotted with caraway-seeds. They were 'winning' and greeting away their superfluous whey, puffing out their damp bulk, as if inflated with sighs, and at last letting little lachrymose streams ooze from their unsound

All sum

sides and drip, drip on the bench and on the fertilised grass below. The ponderous square grey stone, worked with a screw, in a wormeaten frame, which formed the cheese press, stood beyond the bench. To and from it several times a day the Misses Quhair might be seen in their wrappers, with their flat arms bare to the shoulders, conveying their handiwork, and ere the routine of pressing and winning was completed, bringing back plates full of ivorywhite or ruddy cheese parings, to

be eaten as a salt relish at any time between meals, with what was over crumbled down to the hens and ducks which came pecking and waddling about the door.

There was no superfluous love of dairy accompaniments in these particulars. The Misses Quhair lived largely by milk, butter, and cheese

articles which, fortunately for them, were in constant consumption, the poorest common sailor's or day-labourer's wife requiring them according to her quality, as well as the Wedderburns and the Erskines. And to describe the Misses Quhair without their dairy would be to describe Miranda and her father, Caliban and Ariel, without the desert island, or the banished duke and his courtiers, Rosalind and Orlando, without the Forest of Ardennes. The COWS were the worldly circumstances which moulded the Misses Quhair's characters, they were the worldly interest of their lives. The Misses Quhair not only lived by their cows, but, simple uncultivated women, the cows came to monopolise their minds as thoroughly as his mill did the mind of the Miller of Dee. All strangers who visited Sandycroft found the whole place pervaded with an odour and flavour of milk and kine. They saw the whole life regulated by the life of the byre and checked off into periods of calving, going to grass, putting on stubble, running 'yelled." They heard in the conversation of the Misses Quhair as many allusions to bovine peculiarities as to human distinctions. They learned that on winter nights the Misses Quhair slept with their front door open and themselves exposed to frost-bites and vagrants, that they might hear, rise, and step out to look after an ailing cow. Mashes for Cowie, Hornie, Nell, Berwick, were held quite as important as ever was gruel for the Misses Quhair. To humour these dignitaries, the Misses

Quhair would themselves take hooks before the cutting grass was ready, and wander of an evening all over the greens, to cut from rich nooks aprons full of young clover for the suppers of extortionate favourites. The death of a cow was a calamity to be deplored too deeply for words. With more awe and terror than they approached the subject of the cholera visitation, the Misses Quhair spoke with bated breath of the disease'-the fell disease from Holland, brought by tainted heads of cattle to neighbouring farms, and liable in a week's time to depopulate a healthy, happy byre. An edition of the Bucolics might have been written at Sandycroft, with the neighbourhood of Oatness instead of Mantua for a locality, and Mathie Loudon, the Oatness poet, for Virgil. Within Sandycroft there prevailed the same tone of milk, of early rising, of three diets of milking, straining, measuring, feeding the calves, and supplying the customers, who, at stated hours of evening and morning, assembled at the dairy for Miss Quhair to dispense its produce. Naturally a stream of gossip should have flowed from such a gathering, as perennial as the streams of milk,-no establishment competing with a French crêmerie and a Scotch milk-house for gossip, unless it be that of the common mangle-woman of a town. Under the circumstances the ladies of Oatness, who were so ill fated as to have to do with maid-servants, considered it next to an interposition of Providence to preserve their own and their neighbours' good names, that the Misses Quhair were still, people said, sullen women, proud in their way, standing in the gap, as it were, to stop rather than let loose tongues.

The Misses Quhair had little leisure for aught but what was connected with their calling, little time and thought to spare for being finical about their house or their

persons.

The best room at Sandycroft was full of mahogany and horse-hair furniture, darkly seen, for the window was small, the half blind did not draw up, and the window itself was rarely opened, in order to prevent the admission of dust. The room smelt frequently of a withered flower in a glass, which was only filled afresh on Saturdays, and deposited with its long straggling honesty, its staring daisies, and ragged yellow bachelor's buttons, on the central table with the claw foot, which was as the apple of the Misses Quhair's eyes. The Misses Quhair were partial to artificial flowers, because the first did not need to be changed. There were, in jars and on stands, looming out of the gloom, stiff washed-out effigies of flowers, made of shells, flourishing paper flowers, stuffy worsted flowers, dingy feather flowers. Faintly distinguishable on the largepatterned lilac, pink and green paper on the wall there hung photographs of the Misses Quhair, done in the early days of photography,

over natural

when the art contracted the brows and obliterated the eyes. The photographs were so unpleasantly like each other, though Miss Eelen was in a bonnet, Miss Jean in a headdress, and Miss Suffie in her hair, that, particularly as they were turned in one direction, the effect was that of the spectator seeing double-nay, treble-in the reproduction of the same individual, with the dress slightly altered by some marvel of optics. It was a positive relief to discern another photographic group in which a gentleman and children figured, so that, let them frown and wink as they would, it could not be a fourth representation of the Misses Quhair.

The Misses Quhair only saw company in their best room, or put their Sabbath-day bonnets, shawls, and gowns on the table there, till they had time to lay away those