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is very complete and very strong, and at this moment the whole of it is being concentrated on this point. Already a number of operatives, far more than is necessary to turn a general election, have through their delegates given in their adherence to the Fair Trade League.' Well, we shall see, but the gentleman who thus asserts, passing forthwith into a forgetful rather than in a vauntful mood, says another queer sort of thing. For five or six years,' quoth he, 'they have been consuming their savings and the funds of their trade societies; one rich trade society having paid no less than 200,000l. in 'work pay,' and reduced its capital to 100,000l.' Which statement, I will ask of the stater, is most worthy of our trust? I will answer in a word attributed to Dr. Johnson. Which, Doctor,' said one of two disputants in orthoepy, as I understand scholars style right speaking, is it proper to say, neither or neether?' Nayther,' answered the great umpire; and I follow his example in the present instance. What, indeed, is the use of spending time and thought upon the random voices of so smart a writer as he who in one page lauds to the skies the intelligence and the organisation of the working classes, and in another tells the whole world (as if those classes were not themselves among the listeners) that the operative classes in England do not think for themselves as they do in France and America: they follow without question those who lead them?' Behold, my friends and brethren, the fine foundation of Conservative hopes and Protectionist calculations! Which prophet,' demands the young master of Ember Court, Surrey, already cited, may I ask, now in 1881, has proved himself most worthy of our trust?' One may easily determine how his one question would be answered by the writer who, in the memorable words of one of the two, replies, "We have a redundant population hemmed in by the melancholy ocean.' I for my part will answer by a not unsuitable evasion: 'He that trusteth in his own heart,' saith the wisest of men, 'is a fool.'

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This home-county baronet is in his turn a prophet, and verily he cannot be charged with being one of those who, as the margin has it, smooth their tongues,' and, according to the text, 'speak unto us smooth things.' On the contrary, he has made sackcloth his garment, and, seated in ashes, cries with a lamentable voice, The cloud that threatens the industrial existence of England has been gathering and intensifying for six years.' Now, who, I pray you, most lugubrious Sir, was King over Israel during nearly the whole of that lustreless lustrum? Surely no man of light or leading,' but more likely some jack-o'-lantern, leading to bewilder, and dazzling to blind!' Be that as it may, it is evident that the devout baronet has been deep in his Bible, for he almost rivals John Bright himself in the biblical archaism of his phraseology, as he pictures deluded and desolated England, 'intoxicated with success, with her

immense accumulated wealth, her machinery, her coal, her iron, her insular position, thinking herself unassailable, and laughing at the possibility of foreign competition.' Phrases nearly equal to the loftiest in the Apocalypse, where we read of one whose sin had reached unto heaven, who had glorified herself and lived deliciously, and said in her heart I am a queen, and am no widow; I shall see no sorrow.' Can we help being reminded of that great city Babylon, that mighty city, whose judgment in one hour had come?' Do we not seem to see and hear the merchants of the earth weeping and mourning over her; no man buying her merchandise any more, but all standing afar off for the fear of her torment; in one hour so great. riches coming to nought, and every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, standing afar off, because of the smoke of her burning, as in one hour she is made desolate? Which, I say, shall we admire the most, the picture or the parody? Parody, indeed! or bathos were the fitter word; for the eloquent jeremiad, from the height of pathos suddenly falling into the deeps of bathos, ends with the anti-climax, She offered to fight the rest of the world with her right hand tied behind her back!'

From this unlucky Eton or perhaps Harrow reminiscence, when Mr. Gully peradventure was professor in the noble art of selfdefence,' let me hasten to liberate our professor in the new chair of fair trade,' by searching for some needle of eye and point in the hay-bundle of his iterated and reiterated fallacies, for all the world. as like each other as the still green blades and spires in a truss not yet thatched.

When this fortunate successor to a baronetcy and an estate affirms that the working men of England are badly off now,' we will not affect to deny that their case might be better; but, when the misfortune is charged upon isolated free trade,' my answer is that there is too little trade, free or fair, isolated or multitudinous. A man of many assertions and few proofs is sure to land himself in a quagmire before he has done; and so it is here. In one page we read of the marked depreciation in the quality of English goods'; in the next foreigners have flooded our markets with cheap, and often nasty, manufactured goods.' In short, England has been made the market for the shoddy of all nations; of inferior, often adulterated, goods, made at the lowest possible cost, and sold at the lowest possible price!'

Well, if we did not know by this time with whom we have to deal, we should have both eyes and ears opened to a realising stretch by one sentence in these lucubrations: The apathy with which the nation views the collapse of agriculture is astounding.' There spake with full tongue the country squire: of course, the mere truth or untruth of the halloo is a secondary question. Yet, by

implied admission, it is the nation on one side and the men of acres on the other; that speaks any number of whole volumes in a baker's dozen of words; and, God save the mark! it is on a question of supplies for the national oven!

Well, in a fight like this we must be content to measure swords or break a lance with whomsoever comes. The matter at stake is in its nature ordinary-a mixed matter of truths or facts, and of axioms or principles. At this moment we see before us an imposing array of facts, or, at least, of figures. They look endless, but it is by a device. had recourse to on the boards of theatres, where, by the continuous circulation of a small number of seeming soldiers around a pasteboard pillar, a large host is made to impose itself upon the spectators who really fill the house. The facts, whether factitious or no, are, from the trick of iteration, a great deal less numerous than in semblance they appear; and when, by keen and critical inspection, reduced to the actual number, on closer examination they are found to be facts of different sorts and in different degrees. A few, indeed, are facts about which there can be no contest, whatever may be their amount of force in argument and demonstration. A second class are but half facts, which, severed from their other moieties, are mere distortions. The remainder have no just claim to be received as facts at all; but, not with needless incivility to stigmatise them as lies, falsehoods, or even fibs, are, nevertheless, loose assertions, figments of the fancy, hallucinations of a dyspeptic stomach and a disordered brain. If called upon for proof of these distinctions, I content myself for the present with asking what we are to denominate such phrases as these:-Querulous entreaties for better terms only afford more convincing evidence of our folly.' 'The marked depreciation in the quality of English goods.' 'The moral stagnation of the masses.' Throughout the whole of America and France every class, rich and poor, statesmen and pressmen, producers and consumers, are absolutely unanimous in upholding Protection.' If Cicero's wish were possible, that "every man should have written on his brow what he really thought of the affairs of the State," the words Free Trade would now appear on the foreheads of but very few of the electors of England.' 'The world still persists in regarding them (the principles of Cobden) as nonsense.' 'I doubt whether during the whole of the present generation a single convert has joined the Free-trade faith.' And yet, strange to say, 'sophisms have been preferred to experience, theories to facts, and paradoxes to common sense. The most sanguine must allow there is something rotten in the state of England.' The agricultural interest is on the verge of ruin, and the manufacturing interest is in a condition that alarms all engaged in it.' 'France imposes tariffs of from fifteen to fifty per cent. on English goods; but that is not a war of tariffs—

oh! dear, no-it is only a war of tariffs when, in self-defence, England imposes duties on French goods.' 'Bradford is nearly ruined, and both manufacturers and operatives are emigrating to America.' "With the exception of the bankers, the brokers, the brewers, the distillers, and the publicans, and the importers of foreign goods, every class in the community is either losing money or working without profit.' With perfect confidence I leave it to the discriminating judgment of every intelligent hearer or reader to determine to which of the three categories just defined these bold statements belong. If I mistake not (and they all are but samples), the facts will be found scarce, the half-truths in excess, and the airy nothings in a majority.

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But, while dwelling in the region of imagination and invention, this romantic writer occasionally descends to the terminology, if not to the logic, of the demonstrator. There is no escape,' quoth he, 'from the two horns of the dilemma-Protection or emigration. Which will the operative class of Great Britain select? Will they protect their labour and their industries, as their fellow-workers all over the world have done, and remain at home? Or will they quit the land of what is falsely called Free Trade for the land of what is actually and really Fair Trade?' Now, in the first place, why is the decisive issue referred to a set of dolts, who, according to the questioner, do not think for themselves as they do in France and America?' In the next place, how came he to forget that he was dealing, on the one hand, with the greatest nation and country in the Old World, and the thinly-peopled, while illimitable, country of the New; and, on the other hand, to repeat his own second-hand sneer, with a redundant population hemmed in by the melancholy ocean?' But, however, I will not shrink from frankly answering his main inquiry; and it will be seen, as I do so, whether or not my fellow-operatives think I have answered him discreetly. My answer, then, is, that they will do in the future as they have done in the past: a part of them will stay at home to denounce and resist the idea of Protection, and a part of them will go abroad-I suppose, to participate in that good fortune which, according to this gentleman, exists everywhere but here, and also to make a little elbowroom for those who, like Bonaparte in St. Helena, remain prisoners to the melancholy ocean.' If, however, we are, so 'redundant' and so hemmed in,' what wonder that, while emigration flows from other shore to the shores of the Atlantic, not one ever every comes to England?' Were the fact so, whereas it seldom is, when this imaginative writer fancies himself in the groundward region of fact, surely the reason of it was plain even to groundling understandings. Do not our lords and squires persist in surrounding themselves with a sanitary cord of manifold twist of many miles breadth, as if

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they dreaded contact with the brutish herd who do not think for themselves?' And yet, hemmed in as these melancholy creatures are by waters not more melancholy than themselves, and huddling together as they do in those lugubrious towns which are their only refuge, it is remarkable what herds of Italian organ-grinders, and Savoyards with their monkeys, squeeze in amongst us; how in London there are almost as many German bread or sugar bakers and counting-house clerks as there are native Britons in these pursuits. In short, one meets almost daily with as many nationalities in this metropolis as were assembled in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. In good sooth, were the owners (at present) of entailed estates as careful to live within their incomes as they are to seclude themselves within their overgrown domains, they would be able to let their farms at rents on which occupiers might live in comfort and our labourers be not quite slaves, and might learn at length to put their deer parks under the useful plough, and wildernesses, too long left desolate and waste, might, as the fervid prophet has it, be tilled, and become like the garden of Eden!

But let the farmers know who are really, and not in mere pretence, their friends. I ask my fellow-operatives whether they do not sympathise with the tillers of the soil, and their griefs and disappointments? I am sure they do, and so do all honest and unselfish Englishmen of every class. Mr. Bright, whom this gentleman rather grudgingly quotes, did so when he connected the low state of our home trade with a succession of bad harvests, and fairly admitted that, in the Apostle's beautiful words, there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care one for another; and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, and one member be honoured (or do well), all the members rejoice with it. Such language as this (carrying the stamp of its divinity upon the face of it) bears out the words of the first Free-traders fiveand-thirty years ago, when, as this gentleman cynically calls to mind, they claimed to be doing God's work.' What! he in effect exclaims, God's work to destroy the landowner?' Well, no; but let the landowner take heed to himself, lest another warning in sacred words prove as applicable to him as it was to the people to whom it was first addressed, 'O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself!'

Should it be thought that I have paid over-much attention to this paper, which takes the lead in the August number of the Nineteenth Century, my answer is, that it not merely occupies the first place in this well-known publication, but its appearance has been timed to be simultaneous with the first announcement of the hatching of the egg that was laid in the private meeting at the Westminster Palace Hotel, and is distinctly the first exposition of the title given to the resulting chick. Its name in the politico-economical ornithology is The National