therefore, as well as for the inherent vileness of the abuses themselves does he urge war upon them with so much acrimony.

There is nothing upon which our author insists more earnestly and more frequently than this, that government is a work of nicety and difficulty, the subject of a peculiar science, requiring long study and appropriate intellectual culture. This is one of the marks by which our author's radicalism stands most strikingly distinguished from the radicalism of a vulgar demagogue, who may generally be known by his appeals to "plain understanding" and " commonsense," and attempts to persuade the ignorant that ignorance is no disqualification for judging of politics, and knowledge no advantage. Being convinced that few persons are capable of being good legislators, and that these few are more likely to be found among those who are compelled to be industrious, than among those who are at liberty to be idle, our author contends strongly for reducing the number of the House of Commons, and allowing salaries to the members.

"The number of persons at present before the public, and possessing the requisite qualifications for legislators, is few, and it is only by degrees that they can expect to find them. The qualifications which fit a man for a legislator are precisely those which will prevent him from thrusting himself before the public, to squabble with brawling demagogues and designing knaves. Men fitted for legislators are few and valuable; they must be sought ere they can be found. Until a sufficient number shall appear, the people must continue strictly to cross-examine all claimants; more especially until a sufficient salary shall be attached to the office, to support the incumbent, while he is giving his services to those who employ him. So long as a man shall be expected to transact a painful duty gratis, so long will he, if not honest, contrive the means of remunerating himself in an indirect manner, to a far greater amount than he would receive if directly paid. One of the honestest men upon record-Andrew Marvell-received public pay as a member of Parliament until the day of his death. The absurdity of not paying legislators, of not supporting them while engaged in the public service, is monstrous. The highest possible talent is required, together with the severest study, to make them fit for the office. They are the most important class in the community, for on them the welfare of the community, to a great extent, depends. Judges are paid, and they are mostly the mere executors of what the intellect of legislators has prepared for them in the shape of laws. Magistrates are paid; lawyers are paid, -as well as all those engaged in every branch of executive justice, yet the highest of all, the law-makers, are in many cases left to want. Can it enter into the imagination of any one that the science of law-making is indigenous to peculiar breeds of men? Do they conceive that the possession of "property" is sufficient to confer moral and political knowledge in its highest grade? Do they imagine that the most wealthy men are likely to pursue the business of legislation as an amusing study? If not, would they wish to exclude a man of high intellect, merely because he happens to be poor and industrious; for the exclusion of all such men is the inevitable consequence of the present absurd arrangement? The proper payment of members should be amongst the first things for the community at large to insist upon, as a great security for the honesty of their representatives. It should, in fact, form one of the pledges required from candidates. The Scot, when about to hire himself as a servant, was asked what wages he required. Understanding well his own pecuniary interests, he would not state any sum, which would have fixed the amount, but replied in a general manner, 'I'll just pick up the wee things aboot the hoose; sae I carena muckle for the pennie fee.' The wee things,' of course, he contrived to make available to three times the amount he would have received in hard cash; and just so has been the case with the unpaid members of Parliament."

Our author's sense of the unspeakable value of intellect and knowledge, evinces itself in his proposition that men of letters, and inventors in science and art, should be pensioned at the expense of the state; patent rights and copyrights being abolished, as injurious monopolies, and not an effectual nor a skilful mode of rewarding the labour and merit of the writer or the inventor. We are the more desirous to attract notice

to this feature in our author's speculations, as the enemy are fond of imputing to persons of strong democratic opinions, a disdain of literary attainments, and of all intellectual pre-eminence.

"There are two classes of persons, who probably contribute more to the general welfare of the community than any others. I allude to literary authors, and mechanical and other inventors. It is clearly most desirable that the comfortable maintenance of these persons should be provided for, in a mode which might afford the best possible security against their falling into want, and which, at the same time, might leave them the fullest leisure for prosecuting their valuable labours, without being under the necessity of occupying their time with painful exertions in the pursuit of money, to yield them a subsistence; or of petty details, which more ordinary men would perhaps plod through to greater advantage. The power of invention is, unfortunately for the possessors, though perhaps under present arrangements, advantageously for the public at large, rarely accompanied by prudence; but when it is, the condition of the inventor is improved at the cost of the public. He who invents one thing by a process of induction, as is the case with the higher class of inventors, could, and probably would invent more; but if he be a prudent man, so soon as he has secured one valuable scheme, he sets to work to perfect it, and then becomes a manufacturer, realizing in that mode an infinitely larger pecuniary recompense, than he could possibly attain were he to content himself with following the bent of his genius. It is understood, that the valuable results of the powers of the late Dr. Wollaston were much cramped in this way. It was also the case with Mr. Heathcote, the inventor of the bobbinet machine, which has been of such immense service to trade. Had a trustworthy and responsible government existed, means would long since have been devised to reward inventive talent, in such a mode as would insure the development of the largest possible amount. But until such a government shall exist, the present imperfect mode must continue'; which, after all, is, in its actual operation, more of a boon to speculative capitalists, than a recompense to the efforts of genius.

"Even in the case of really valuable inventions, useful to the whole community, how rarely do the inventors permanently benefit by them! The speculator, the dealer, is constantly on the watch, to appropriate them, and realizes a large fortune, while the inventor is usually left to starve, till he has struck out some fresh plan, whereby to procure another small supply of means. How then can the patent-right be said to encourage invention? Thus it is with the inventive writers of books. With years of labour and study, they accomplish new discoveries in the regions of thought. The copyright is secured to them: but what avails it? The booksellers see a chance of profit, and the market is deluged with compilations; using the same matter and ideas, couched in varied language. The author angrily complains: but he might as well talk to the winds. The fact is, that the patent-right of the inventor, and the copy-right of the author are injudicious modes of remunerating public services, and do not accomplish the desired object. In a more healthy state of the public mind, better means will be resorted to. At present they are a necessary evil.

"It has been shewn, that the profiters by inventions are not usually the inventors themselves, but mercantile speculators. Would it not, then, be better to make the pecuniary reward hereafter an inalienable annual pension, paid by the public, the amount of which might be regulated by the importance of the invention, the number of people by whom it was used, and the national saving or advantage accruing therefrom? The pension should also terminate with the life of the inventor. Such a method would clearly be to the advantage of the whole body of inventors; for they would thus be saved from the miseries of want which many of them undergo. Should any inventors object to such a mode of remuneration, and, vain of their own abilities, think that they ought still to be allowed to dictate to the public, by means of a monopoly, it would be well to remind them, that there is no obligation on them to make known, any more than there is on the public to use their inventions. It is a matter of mutual bargain. The skill of the workman who executes is as needful for the perfection of the invention as is the genius of the discoverer who devises it; and neither of them would be one whit benefited, were it not for the public, who purchase and use it. Let not the inventor, then, arrogate too much to himself, because those happen to be few who pursue his vocation; but let him remember the fable of the belly and the members! Many varieties of talent are requisite to accomplish the perfection of a machine.

"Authors, also, who have written works containing new matter beneficial to the community, are entitled to a recompense from the public, as much as other inventors, perhaps more so, because their discoveries are more valuable, as the happiness of man

is at the present period more contingent on moral discovery than it is on physical. To degrade the profession of a teacher of morality, to a mere matter of trade and barter, is injurious to the community. Philosophers can rarely gain a living by their works; the public will not buy enough of copies to leave a profit on their publication. To live by trade, a man must manufacture an article which will ensure a sale. The public prefer books which administer to their passions and amusement. The philosopher would not write the first, even if he could; and it is rarely that he possesses the faculty of writing the latter. Therefore, there can be few writing philosophers, capable of teaching a nation, under the present system; and, unfortunately, men born to wealth, seldom get the necessary mental training to form philosophers. The only good public act of George IV.—perhaps the only good one public or private-was the establishment of a literary fund of one thousand pounds per annum, to be divided among ten literary men of reputation in decayed circumstances. It will be a lasting reproach to the Whig Government, that they deprived these men of their living, in their rage for economy, and at the same time kept up the numberless extravagant pensions of hailots, panders, and sycophants."

It is one of our author's leading doctrines, that "the whole raw material of the whole globe is the property of the whole human race, as tenants in common;" that private property in land will one day cease to exist, a reasonable compensation being made to bona fide possessors; and that the land will then be administered (as it is in India, and other countries of the East) for the benefit of the community generally; that, in the meantime, every human being who is born into the world, "has a moral right to live in the world, and, consequently, has a right to his share of those things, as raw materials, without which he cannot live.” This, without further explanation, is somewhat vague, and susceptible of being practically misapplied; but from any such danger it is secure, if viewed in conjunction with our author's other opinions. What is meant is this, that as nobody is to blame for being born, nobody ought to be allowed to starve while there is food in the world to feed him, when others who preceded him have engrossed, by mere occupancy, those lands and raw materials, which are no more of their making than of his; to which he has as fair a claim as they had originally; and of which, if not previously monopolized, his fractional share might have been sufficient to enable him to live.

This doctrine, the developments of which, though highly interesting we have not space to quote, might easily have misled a less expanded mind than our author's into the vagaries of Spenceanism or Owenism. Holding, as he does, that the original appropriation of the raw material of the globe was wrongful, and the result of force or fraud, he might easily have been led, like so many well-meaning persons before him, into the notion that it is proper to redress this wrong by some of the innumerable modes, direct or indirect, of taking from those who have, to give to those who have not. From all such errors he has been kept clear, by a strong conviction of the tendency of population to tread upon the verge of subsistence; and, consequently, to render all additions to the fund for the maintenance of the labourers ineffectual for the improvement of their condition, except in so far as accompanied by increased habits of prudence. Our author has placed this subject in a light which may be new to some of our readers; and we cannot refrain from quoting him at some length.

"The notion which is commonly entertained, that because a man has a large annual income, he therefore consumes more than his neighbour, is absurd. For example: A man has an estate producing him in rent a thousand pounds per annum. He cannot have this rent till the farmers and labourers who cultivate the land have been fed and clothed sufficiently to keep them, at any rate, in a state of working health. If they were kept lower than this, they either could not work, or they would persih,

or break out into riot. I may therefore assume that they are fed and clothed. The rent and tithes, therefore, are the surplus or profit of the estate. The rent goes to the squire, the tithes to the parson, and we will suppose them one thousand pounds per annum each. What purpose do they turn it to? The squire has a house in which are maintained five of his own family, and three servants; and he must moreover pay his proportion towards the poor rates. The poor he thus maintains yield him no service whatever; and his servants are not exclusively his. One makes his bed, but she also makes her own another cooks the dinner, but it is for her own benefit as well as his another washes his clothes, but she washes her own also. The real personal service which falls to his individual share will be a very small proportion of the whole labour which is performed in the household; and his personal consumption of food and clothing will be the same, because all must be provided for out of the income. He may, if he chooses, have expensive food and clothes, but it must be only out of the surplus, after all the household are provided; and he cannot eat two dinners, or wear two coats, at a time. If one coat per annum is the amount of actual wear, and he has fifty made annually, he can only consume the fiftieth part of each; they will then go to the community to be worn out. And all the time he must have his share of labour, in purchasing provisions, and giving directions for the joint benefit of the household. He must see that the house is repaired, and that the garden produces its crop and, in short, perform all the business of an overlooker. In fact, he is only a distributor, and were his income doubled, trebled, quadrupled, he would still be only a distributor. Were he to keep six servants, or fifty, he would not consume one jot more. He could eat but one dinner, and sleep in but one bed, and wear but the same quantity of clothing, unless indeed he were wantonly to destroy it, which no man does, any more than he burns his house down. And his personal labour would be increased, because he would become a distributor to fifty instead of three. If he turned the matter over to a steward, then the steward would become the distributor instead, and the squire would be merely the receiver of what he needed for his own personal accommodation. The power would pass into the hands of the steward. The parson does all this the same as the squire.

The

"The parson, the stockholder, the merchant, the manufacturer, the aristocrat, the placeman, the pensioner, the soldier, the judge, all, up to the king, are in the same precise condition-they are only distributors. Whatever may be the amount of their income, be it hundreds or millions, still they can only individually consume their maintenance, which differs little in quantity, whether for king or peasant. surplus must be distributed, and the reason is plain. There is a certain amount of food and necessaries annually produced, and a certain quantity imported. They are jointly, rather under than over the demand, and therefore they are sure not to be wasted. By the process called trade, the whole of the provisions are divided amongst the whole of the population. The most energetic amongst the people are sure to be the distributors, just as the foreman of a manufactory is usually the cleverest man in it. It is true that the custom of hereditary succession has placed many dolts in the office of distributors, but they are only apparently so-they are mere tools in the hands of ministers, stewards, &c., who hold the real power. The first class of distributors, of course, help themselves first, and plentifully, to the choicest of food, just as the foreman gets the largest wages. Thus game and rich wines, &c., being comparatively scarce articles, fall to their share. Coarser meats fall to the share of the next class of distributors, and so on downwards, till the poor operatives have nothing left but salt provisions and vegetable substances, as is the case with weavers. Below them again, there are a portion of people dwelling, as it were, on the outskirts of society, who do not get, upon an average, more than two-thirds of the food necessary to keep them in health, and a part of these die off from time to time, when a temporary scarcity occurs. These are principally composed of persons who are, from want of skill, unfit to work, but are too proud, or possess too little energy, to scramble for their share of parochial assistance. They are like the little boys at school, who are pushed away from the fire by the great ones, because it is not sufficiently warm to heat all round. In the parish workhonses, and receiving weekly assistance from the parishes, are comprised a large number of operatives of robust habits, many willing to work, and many lazy, but none of whom would suffer the distributors to go on quietly, if their wants were not tolerably well attended to. From this feeling of self-preservation, the distributors have established poor-laws, i. e. the wealthier distributors; for it must be borne in mind, that the poor weaver, who receives his weekly stipend, is a distributor, when he feeds his wife and children with the provisions his earnings have purchased.

"Thus, it is clear, that the immediate cause of the misery which the people endure is the fact, that their numbers are beyond the proportion of the supply of food 2 C

VOL. III.NO. XV.

and necessaries. Were the food and necessaries in greater proportion than the num ber of the people, there would be no misery arising from that source. A large number of the people who are well fed would possibly remain in perfect health, were they to cede one-fourth of their food, to be divided amongst the ill-fed; but this would, in a short time, be productive of still more extensive misery. They have possibly a claim to an equal share all round, because, although food is produced by labour, and not one in ten actually gives any labour to that object, still we may suppose that all would be equally willing to labour, and the land, as before stated, is the joint property of all. In their half-fed state, the surplus population are incapable of procreation; or, if they have children, they are weakly and die off. But were their food increased to a sufficient quantity, by an equal division, they would breed very rapidly, and the conse quence would be, that unless the supply of food and necessaries could be artificially increased, the whole population would soon be reduced to a half allowance. And if the supply of food were again artificially increased to full allowance, they would again breed beyond it. The struggle might thus go on, if science and industry were successful, till every square yard of land held a human being, and then, in case of a famine, having nothing to fall back upon, they would eat one another."

Our author, therefore, relies for the improvement of the physical condition of the people upon that increase of prudence and self-control, as to the multiplication of their numbers, which he believes to be the natural result of even such increase of intelligence as is now actually taking place. We must here close our extracts. We might have found numerous passages superior, as mere pieces of writing, to those we have quoted. The energy, and strong feeling with which Junius Redivivus almost always writes, occasionally rise into something deserving the name of eloquence. But we preferred to give specimens of his argumentative powers. We have quoted enough to convince, we trust, almost all our readers, that few among the writers for the day are either so bold and independent in thought, or so manly and pure in purpose, as Junius Redivivus; and we shall rejoice if such praise as ours can do any thing to spread the reputation, or (what we are sure he regards much more,) to extend the usefulness of his writings.

THE NEGRO EMANCIPATION BILL.

EVERY attempt at a liberal measure by the Whig Ministers seems destined to prove a failure. Their Reform Bill was their first and only vigorous act in favour of liberty. Ever since, a steady propensity to retrograde has been manifested. The semblance of progress has been found necessary; and some real progress has been made ;—but with what evident reluctance! How plainly Ministers are reformers in spite of themselves. How differently is the cure of State ills beaten into them! Was ever the reluctance with which good measures are adopted, and the desire of retaining as much of the old leaven as possible more manifest than in their Scottish Entail, and Scottish Burgh Reform Bills! And now we have a Negro Emancipation Bill, which displays the qualities of Whig Legislation in full perfection. For the pretended rights of the slave-owners the most tender regard is shewn; for the unequivocally expressed sentiments of the British people, a shew of respect; for the rights of the slave, for the pockets of the people, for the principles of justice, no regard whatever. By this Emancipation Bill, slavery is to be maintained for twelve years; and fifteen millions are to be added to the National Debt, to compensate the slave-owners for the ultimate loss of their PROPERTY, in their fellow-creatures! The thing is an insult to the understanding, to the feelings, and to the sense of justice of the nation. Further comment upon such a worthless project would be superfluous. It is baffled, and that is enough.