these inestimable virtues. But this discouragement should not be unalloyed with hope of improvement. The Irish, and latterly the negro, votes are answerable for a great deal. Education may be expected to improve them. The country is still very young, and perhaps the political corruption is not much greater than it was in England in Walpole's time. And however much we may deplore the failings of our neighbours, we are scarcely in the position to throw stones recklessly at them. For there is a kind of justice beyond the jurisdiction of Westminster Hall or Lincoln's Inn. Our Legislature has taken the people's taxes for all these hundreds of years, and yet has left millions of the population of these isles to-day absolutely uneducated, and in an ignorance so brutal that it could not be credited in America ;—is that justice? The very tone adopted by a large proportion of our upper and upper-middle class people in speaking of strikes is often revoltingly unjust. It is scarcely justice that a cottager who sees a hare in his garden destroying his produce, and knocks it on the head, should be branded as a criminal, and thereby be very probably

ruined for life. Nor is it exactly a thing to be proud of that in Scotland deer-forests of 100,000 acres in extent should be kept without sheep, lest sport should be spoiled; or that in England labour should be drawn from the fields to beat Norfolk stubbles or Yorkshire heather, that one noble sportsman may slaughter with his own hands some 900 birds in one day. Is the tenure of our land, or the state of our great universities, or our method of representation, free from the grossest injustice? And yet, where we have so many crying needs of reform, we are told that the burning questions of the day and the rallying-cries of a great party are the Central Asian difficulty, the maintenance of the aristocratic element in our institutions, the sacredness of endowments; and some people regard our Conservative statesmen as honestly devoting themselves to what they believe to be the best interests of their countrymen in proposing to attract the public attention mainly to such issues. But if by means of a co-operative emigration organisation our labouring classes could have conveyed to them an accurate conception of the conditions of life in America,

L

they might perhaps be not unwilling to prove on their own vile bodies which is in reality the more corrupt state, so far as they are concerned.

It may perhaps be too late for those of our hewers of wood and drawers of water who are already in their prime of life to understand, even in the dimmest fashion, what the very highest privileges of being an Englishman really are; but their children in America may have a fair start with all other classes of men: they will, at any rate, all learn to read and write the language which makes all the English-speaking races kin, and which enables them all to partake equally in the noblest common traditions.

That this should be a real possibility for every class; that a nearer equality between capital and labour should be a dominant condition; that there should be the wide elbowroom that alone can annihilate caste, and that alone can give scope to the experiments that are being now tried on a small scale in England to elevate by co-operation the status of our agricultural population: these are the greater, the wider "potentialities" that every mile of new American railroad built brings a step nearer to practical attainment.

THE FUTURE OF THE AGRICULTURAL

LABOURERS' EMIGRATION.1

Ar last there appears to be something very like a rainbow in the sky-a veritable arch, to join the Old World to the New—which may without exaggeration, we hope, be heralded as a perpetual promise to our agricultural labourers. It is difficult as yet to take the measure of the influence likely to be exerted on the future of emigration by Mr Arch's trip across the Atlantic; but it is almost certain to be a very great influence, probably much greater than is generally understood or acknowledged by employers in England, who seem often disinclined to look in the face the existing conditions of the white labour problem amongst the English-speaking

1 Fraser's Magazine, January 1874.

races. Yet some of these conditions are surely very apparent and important. On the one hand, the vast continents of America and Australia, with undeveloped wealth beyond precedent, are stretching out their hands and crying aloud for the manual labourers necessary for their development; on the other hand, England is overweighted with some hundreds of thousands of these very labourers, able and willing and anxious to work, but owing to the superabundance of their numbers unable to earn wages sufficient to obtain the necessaries of life at home; with no prospect of an independent old age for themselves, nor hope that their children may attain to that deserved equality with all other classes to which they may consider themselves naturally and justly entitled, so soon as their education justifies them in claiming it.

Given the removal of certain existing hindrances, and the movement of these bodies appears to be almost as calculable as the rush of air admitted into an exhausted receiver. Such hindrances have heretofore mainly been (1) want of knowledge as to the true condition of life in the new countries;