American upon a topic of this kind is the most sentimental of living men.

In Massachusetts and Connecticut, in New Hampshire and Vermont, hundreds of farms that twenty years ago were considered as snug and sound financial properties proportionately to their value as farms in Kent or Essex at that time were, have been actually abandoned. Old abiding places where generations of hardy, God-fearing, intolerant, close-fisted yeomen tilled the soil with profit and content, have returned to the clutch of the forests and thickets from which they were rescued with such toil and pain two centuries ago. The proprietors have gone West, or into the manufacturing towns, and have been unable to find at any price buyers and cultivators for their abandoned acres. It is no question of inaccessibility to railroads and conveniences, for New England is as well supplied with such things as Yorkshire. Indeed, it would seem to be the railroads that have killed the country. The factories that, under Protection, have sprung up throughout the whole NorthEast, have by their high wages drawn away the farmers' families from the agricultural districts, while a perfected railway system supplies these manufacturing centres with Western produce at prices which defy local competition. It is not only that great breadths of old farming lands have been actually abandoned; but capital farms, close to towns and thriving villages, well tilled and presenting every apparent comfort and opportunity to the intelligent working farmer, are unsalable. Details come from all parts of New England, and from all classes of people, that to any one who remembers what a solid and convertible article a good farm in the Eastern States was twenty years ago seem incon-. ceivable. Americans even of that part of the country for whose especial benefit Protection has been maintained are beginning to realize the cost of such maintenance, and to understand that others besides the unfortunate Southern farmers have got to pay the piper. Village schools-and no surer baronicter of New England prosperity could be appealed to-have surunk here from a hundred scholars to twentyfive, there from sixty to eighteen, and in some cases collapsed altogether from want of support. Not long ago a Vermonter was met in a London shipping-office taking his ticket for Brisbane. He had first left his

father's farm eighteen years ago, shipped as a seaman, and finally drifted to Australia, where he had married and become naturalized. On this occasion he had been over with his Australian wife to see the old folks in Vermont. His father he found still cultivating the ancestral two hundred acres, but under widely different circumstances. When the son left home in 1871 the farm would have fetched thirty-five dollars an acre any day in the open market, and yielded an abundant living to the family. In 1889, however, the old man was working twice as hard as of yore, and making less than half as much, and had tried in vain to sell at fifteen dollars. His neighbors had nearly all gone West. Their farms had been sold for a song to a great New York shooting club, enclosed in a ring fence, and abandoned to game and to gamekeepers!

Nor is it only from New England tha the cry of depopulation comes; for in a single county in Northern New York four hundred farms are reported as unoccupied. This is worse than anything this country can show. The causes of this decline seem numerous and complex. Emigration to the cheap and fertile lands of the West is, of course, a leading and obvious one, and the Yankee farmer possesses in the highest degree the qualifications for a successful emigrant. Moreover, his exile is generally shared by so many of his old neighbors and kinsfolk that the transition has come easier to him than to most people. The high wages of the manufacturing towns and villages have been another serious drain on the country population; brought, as they have been, almost everywhere within sight of the glare of city life. The very enterprise and intelligence with which the New Englander is generally credited causes him to fall a ready victim to such fascinations. One of the most curious phases of the present condition of rural New England is, that depression and decay are actually more obvious in the neighborhood of flourishing towns than in the remoter districts. It might be supposed that, with such an abundance of consumers close at hand, a ready market would be found for all those smaller and perishable products that to a working farmer, with a working wife, such as is the rule in New England, are generally most profitable. The wholesale supply system, however, even to the extent of the

-Blackwood's Magazine.

LORD DERBY, in his speech at the Liverpool School of Science, was not, in our opinion, as happy as usual in his diagnosis of the conditions under which mankind are moving forward in their conquest of the world of matter. "The general experience of the world hitherto," said Lord Derby, "has been that brilliant but brief epochs of advance have been followed by long intervals of stagnation, and sometimes even of retrogression. Retrogres sion, he went on to say, is not likely, but "stagnation is quite possible." To this view we must oppose a direct negative. We do not believe there is any likelihood of stagnation either in the abstract, or as regards the practical application of knowledge to the arts and industries of life. Lord Derby's conclusion is based upon a false analogy. We admit that in the past there have been recurring periods of stagnation and activity, but we deny that this must be expected to be the rule of the future. And for this very good reason,the conditions are entirely different.

If we look at the history of the world, we shall see that till the beginning of the eighteenth century, the secret of progress, by which knowledge is not merely kept alive, but made to germinate, never belonged to more than a strictly limited number of people. The Egyptians and the Phoenicians possessed it once, but it soon died out in them,-the soil being, as it were, exhausted by the enormous crop at first produced. The seeds of progress planted in the Far East proved also incapable of development. When, however, they were transplanted to Greece, they became at once vitalized, and spread thence throughout Southern Europe and Western Asia, gathering vigor in the process. Though the Hebrews gave the civilized world its religion, it was from Greece alone that material progress came. Rome learned the lesson of civilization from Hel

las, and when the barbarians and internal corruption had destroyed the Roman power, the Greek spirit—made living again by that strangest of human movements which we call the Renaissance-once more awakened men's minds to the sense that it was their business to make themselves truly masters of the earth on which they are placed. But throughout these stages of advance the communities in which the seed of progress were grown.were small in size. The Greeks, who thought and studied, were a microscopic people, and the true Romans that is, those capable of culture -were hardly more numerous. Again, even after Italy had spread the new learning to France, Spain, Germany, and England, only a comparatively few people were in the possession of the fruits of knowledge. Not until the end of the seventeenth century, when we may estimate that there were something like ten million educated persons in existence, had the area of cultivation become large enough to prevent recurrent periods of stagnation. Up till then, there had only been, as it were, a single acre fit for tillage, and, naturally enough, it could not be made to produce a good yield every generation. Now, however, it is possible to have something like a rotation of crops, and this provides an effective preservative against periods of stagnation. Instead of ten millions of educated persons, we have, including America, nearly a hundred millions possessed of the machinery of thought, and these one hundred millions are scattered over the whole face of the globe-in America, Africa, and Australia, as well as in Europe-and under a thousand different conditions, social, political, and climatic. But the result of having ten or twelve separate types of civilization, all belonging to the races which feel the impulse toward progress, is greatly to stimulate the aggregate intellect of mankind. For instance,

while the inventiveness or the scientific imagination of the people of England may be getting exhausted for a time, the processes of thought are being quickened across the Atlantic. But when a discov. ery is made in America, it is immediately transplanted to England; and since transplantation, in the region of ideas as of fruits, stimulates and strengthens, the result is a fresh advance in the country which seemed temporarily asleep. Take the following example. England produced Darwin, and Germany, though at that moment not specially conspicuous for scientific discoveries, at once showed herself receptive to his ideas. There they fructified in profusion, and as a result we are now importing German scientific teachings, and are thereby producing a fresh crop in England. The conditions of modern civilization, in fact, render stagnation most improbable. It may happen, no doubt, that occasionally the world will be for many years without a Joule or a Darwin; but this is not stagnation. All along the line there will continue to be material progress, and progress at an increasing ratio. That the more a human being knows, the more he adds to his knowledge, is only natural. As "creation widens in man's view," he discovers new subjects for thought and investigation. The discovery of the law of gravity, and of the mechanical equivalent of heat, and of the electric current, have opened long vistas of potential knowledge to the inquirer of the future. While man was ignorant of the world in which he lives, he thought it a circumscribed prison, the four walls of which were almost within his touch. Now he knows that if a prison, it is practically a limitless one, and that there are an infinite series of secret chambers only waiting his exploration, and out of which his domain may be indefinitely in

creased.

It must not be supposed, however, that because we do not think it possible that a period of stagnation can be produced by internal causes, we therefore consider our European civilization beyond all risks of destruction. On the contrary, we hold it to be quite within the bounds of possibility that it may perish, just as the Roman world did, in a flood of militant barbarism. We have not the slightest desire to declare that our civilization will be destroyed from outside, but we differ entirely from the notion that it cannot be. We hold with

Lord Wolseley, who has seen the Chinese and seen them at war, that the Mongolian race is quite capable, under certain easily conceivable circumstances, of overrunning Continental Europe, of stamping out our progressive civilization, and of establishing their own cast-iron, immovable polity in its stead. That they will actually do this is, we grant, unlikely enough; but it is absurd to speak as if it would be impossible for them to do so. It is not difficult to demonstrate the existence of this possibility. The population of China is at least 300 millions. This was the computation of the Marquis Tseng, though the French authorities say 381 millions, and Professor Legge, the Professor of Chinese in the University of Oxford, declares that 400 millions is nearer the true number. But the former one provides an utterly inexhaustible reservoir of fighting men who can learn to use weapons of precision as well as Europeans, who are as industrious and as ingenious as beavers, who are perfectly obedient to orders, who are quite fearless as regards death, not merely when in a condition of mental exaltation, but habitually, and who would not mutiny, no matter what their hardships, unless prevented from gambling. If, as Lord Wolseley says, this population ever awakes, produces Generals, and determines not to let itself be excluded from all the best places of the earth, it will be impossible to withstand it. The Chinese would not, of course, overrun Europe like Napoleon, but their silent, steady pressure would be quite irresistible. Inch by inch they would appropriate the Western civilized world. Even now, when the Chinese are for all practical purposes dormant, it is difficult for the Russians to prevent them filling up the provinces of the Amoor. What, then, would be the result, if they once adopted a forward policy? Their advance would be like that of the Lemmings in Norway, except that they would know how to take ship, and so would find the sea no obstacle. If Russia, necessarily the first victim, were conquered, and the Chinese, wearing some horrible veneer of civilization, were to establish themselves in Poland, the rest of Continental Europe would soon succumb, and we should then see Lord Wolseley's Battle of Armageddon between the Anglo-Saxon and the Mongolian realized. If the English were beaten, civilization as we know it must die out, for