action. If no aid can be got from other quarters, revolution may be upon us before the cure is worked. Thus, while we must approve of reformers urging the abolition of this law, and advise all whose prevalent sentiment is conservative to favour the abolition; yet we should hold it a folly to feel any large satisfaction or any safety from the concession of this demand, except as an omen of co-operation from the most powerful classes.

4. The registration of estates and mortgages is a reform in which none are more interested than landed proprietors themselves. Only that part of them which is deeply in debt can have any interest to the contrary, and theirs is not a very honourable interest. It is much to be wished, for the good name and good will of the landed aristocracy, as well as the welfare of the nation, that the fullest publicity should exist both as to proprietorship and as to all agricultural facts. This reform deserves to be pressed on its own ground; but it would in itself barely lessen one barrier, and by no means the stubbornest, which keeps the cultivators from earning right in the soil and its crops.

5. Lastly, it is said by some who sympathize with the toiling peasant, The landlord ought to be forced by law to sell land to a resident cultivator who desires a freehold, then the labourer would have a motive to save.' Of such a scheme we cannot judge rightly until it is detailed; but, we are sorry to say, we are not able to conceive how the principle could be made to work. Enact that Lord Leconfield shall sell six acres to any peasant that claims it of him, and the questions arise, Which six acres? and at what price? The landlord could evade the claim by choosing them unfavourably, as well as by asking too much. Is a jury to make the selection, and award the price? Everything here seems to depend upon the machinery, and it will certainly be a long time before the landed gentry submit to compulsory sale, which, if it become possible at all, may be repeated an unlimited number of times. Lastly, one wonders

whence he who urges such a claim imagines that the peasant can save the purchase money. If only that be first done the chief difficulty in elevating the whole order will have been overcome.

We fall back on the conviction, that though legislators and landlords ought not to oppose, but in every nicely balanced question ought kindly to assist, an industrial revolution in favour of the peasants, yet the motive power which alone can effect this revolution lies with the artizans of the towns primarily, and with the peasants themselves secondarily. Thirty-nay, twenty years have wrought a vast change in the artizan class. The "physical-force Chartists' have long since vanished. Their successors better understand their own strength and weakness, and in the last ten years have learnt that the road to competence lies through co-operation. Beginning from a common shop, which virtually gives them retail goods at wholesale prices, they learn, first the value of cash payments, next the rich reward of selfdenial, especially of the very cheap self-denial involved in abstinence from tobacco and intoxicating drinks. Such are the small and feeble sources of their first gains, which quickly accumulate, as soon as a taste and motive for saving has been formed. Nothing can be more futile than the idea that the poor can be elevated by the charities of the rich. Our best charity is to teach them how to help themselves, and remove all gratuitous obstacles or diversions; but the wealth of the rich, if divided among the poor, would be simply absorbed, with little visible result. The millions must earn their own wealth; and they will do it when the motive is supplied and evil temptations are lessened. The artizans have already learned that by co-operation their societies can in a few years save and earn capital which is computed by thousands and tens of thousands. From the common shop they have proceeded to the flour mill, and are contemplating to have their own farms. One attempt at least has been made at manufacturing; but if

they go beyond the supply of their own wants they enter upon a dangerous and uncertain experiment. Hitherto their safe and sure road has been in undertakings in which they themselves are immediate customers; and as they have supplied themselves with grocery and bread, the next step (they think) is to supply themselves with meat and other farm produce by buying a freehold farm.

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So plausible is this idea that it seems certain to fasten on their imagination; nevertheless, so soon as they attempt to realize it, they will find the case widely different from their former undertakings. The farm, if tended by their hired servants, cannot be more productive to them than to an ordinary farmer. They will need to pay their bailiff, as well as the wages of the peasants; and will probably find, like many a gentleman who tries to raise vegetables and fruit in his own garden, that, however pleasant the result, it is decidedly more expensive than buying in the market, and is a singularly bad investment. Co-operation' cannot be talked of on the farm until it is divided into small holdings, or the workmen are all shareholders; and it is only by the great increase of produce which is thus obtained that land can pay more than the small interest which amateurs accept. The artizans largely come from the country, and retain affectionate remembrances of their rural birth. Most of them would be glad to establish one or more of their children as peasant proprietors, if that were possible. They further begin to understand, that, as an order, they cannot rise politically, unless the peasants be raised, whose depression and scanty remuneration are the load which socially and politically weighs down the artizan class. They have, in the case first of Mr. Robert Owen, next of Mr. Fergus O'Connor, shown how zealously they desire a new agricultural development. For all these reasons, it seems probable that if a co-operative society began by buying one moderate-sized farm, and divided it into portions of six to ten acres, they might find either

among their own members, or among other townsmen known and trusted by them, persons rich enough to provide seed and stock, and live through the first year on such holdings, and willing to occupy them for themselves or their sons. The beginning is the great difficulty, while plans are untried and every one is timid; but in a society which counts its members by the hundred, it is not beyond probability that ten or a dozen may be found answering the above conditions. If the small tenants have but a secure tenure, they will be able to pay a good rent without oppressing themselves—a rent probably double that of common farmers; so that the society, if it do not gain profits so large as in hazardous trade, may probably get six or seven per cent. The tenants must be secured in possession for themselves and children, so long as they pay the quit rent, and should have an option of converting their holding into freehold by buying off the rent in one payment or by instalments, on a scale previously approved. Such conditions would make the tenure, from the first, as secure as a freehold to one who was not wholly poor, and would supply to him the motive for economy, diligence, and study of agriculture in the Flemish and Guernsey sense.

The first thing of all is to show, on however small a scale, that such cultivation can succeed, can give independence to the cultivator without loss to the society which establishes him. Should the existing societies be unwilling to make the experiment, it is quite possible (if only the artizan class be prosperous) that a special society may rise among those interested for self or son, expressly to make this experiment. When once it has succeeded, we predict that it will be taken up on a greater scale, that somewhat larger estates will be bought and broken up, and a real co-operation be introduced-on the one hand by the society providing certain agricultural machines, and letting them for hire; on the other, by the holders entering into special agreements for combined labour. The mere peasants have not yet enterprise, intel

ligence, or wealth enough to be the pioneers of such a movement; but if once they see peasant proprietors, and learn that such a state is not impossible to themselves, they will have a new and cogent motive for self-denial and saving. Some among them, where wages are high, will actually save, and a commencement will be made towards a more hopeful state.

Is it quite beyond hope that a few philanthropic landlords in different counties may, for so great a public object, rise above the routine of their class, and endeavour to initiate a better system? This question we had many times asked ourselves. We have a partial reply in Mr. Fawcett, p. 292, and another in a letter of the special correspondent of the Morning Star, from Buckinghamshire. Mr. Fawcett writes:

A considerable area of land, belonging to Mr. Gurdon, of Assington Hall, Suffolk, has been during many years most successfully cultivated on the co-operative principle. . . . Mr. Gurdon let his land to the labourers, charging them the ordinary rent which would be paid to a tenant farmer. He advanced them sufficient capital to cultivate the land; and this capital was to be repaid in a certain number of years. Mr. Gurdon has now been repaid all the capital which he originally advanced, and these co-operative farms are in the highest state of cultivation. The labourers, as at Rochdale, select from amongst their own body a committee of management, and those who are employed receive ordinary agricultural wages. The profits are divided according to a plan very similar to that which has been adopted at Rochdale.

The correspondent of the Morning Star (October 6th), who in a series of letters graphically and pungently exhibits the miseries of the peasants in Buckinghamshire, gives at the same time high praise to some of the landlords, and to none so emphatically as to Mrs. Fitzgerald of Shalstone, whom he calls the presiding angel of the place,' which seems like a paradise in the midst of dilapidated villages.' In pronouncing this lady's conduct to be 'noble beyond all praise,' we presume him to take for granted that her great improvements in the labourers' dwellings and schooling have been effected by a large pecu

niary sacrifice. Such sacrifices show the heart, and are highly encouraging, but they cannot be expected of an order of men. Mrs. Fitzgerald has not introduced any new principle, as Mr. Gurdon has, which may be imitated by those who will not make large sacrifices. Even Mr. Gurdon's proceeding, though justly panegyrized by Mr. Fawcett, leaves the problem but half solved. What is to forbid Mr. Gurdon's successor to take advantage of the increased value which the diligent work of the co-operators has imparted to the soil, and to raise the rent so as again to reduce the labourers to indigence? We presume that the fear of such an event has not hitherto sensibly checked their industry; yet in the improvement and decorating of cottages nothing can give to a tenant the same enterprise and lavish care as freehold rights impart. Mr. Gurdon's excellent and philanthropic work will be complete when he has fixed the yearly due as a quit rent incapable of being raised, and has guaranteed them against ejectment while it is duly paid. Even then it would be desirable that they should have the option of buying off this liability to rent. It will also be remarked that Mr. Gurdon magnanimously advanced capital to men wholly indigent, who might have failed to pay from mere want of skill in a new enterprise. We cannot expect this example to be widely imitated; but a landlord well-disposed, if not willing to run risks by such advances, can evade the difficulty, in great measure, by giving to labourers, on one farm at a time, a sort of métayer tenure for several years. Let them be paid, not in a fixed wage, but according to the crop, and they will by voluntary zeal and extra work largely increase the crop. A just landlord, if his contract prove from this cause more profitable than a farmer's rent, will pay back to them the difference. A few years of métayer tenure might enable the men to accumulate capital so as to need no advance from the landlord when they take a farm directly on their own hands.

In past days, any allusion to the

more prosperous condition of the actual cultivators in the Free States of the American Union used to meet the reply, that this is due to their abundance of land, and that we, in our little island, cannot hope for the same. We need not press hard in reply on cases like Mr. Gurdon's peasants; for, when we turn to the petty islands of Guernsey and Jersey the same phenomenon confronts us; their cultivators are more prosperous and self-dependent than ours. Evidently, then, we have deluded ourselves. Neither largeness nor smallness of land is our defect, but false principle. Direct interest in the crop, and secure tenure of his place, are what our peasant needs. Recent years have shown how false was our notion concerning the poverty of the French cultivator. Miserly the class may be, but not poor: the sums of money which they freely lend to the Emperor is a decisive disproof of that error. Equally have we exaggerated the division of the soil in France; a topic which nevertheless is not here to the purpose, for no Englishman is just now proposing to introduce the French law. At the same time, we habitually mistake that law; nor do its principles deserve the summary contempt which even our Prime Minister thinks it decorous to express. Two instructive letters on the subject have appeared in the Morning Star, from the pen of Monsieur A. Ansas, Avocat,' who explains that the French law does indeed prevent a parent from wholly disinheriting a child, but does not enforce an entirely equal division of property. Like Frenchmen of every rank and class, he looks on our peasants with pity, on our aristocracy with amazement. Our peers ought at any rate to reflect that a peasantry which has a stake in the soil is sure to be highly conservative, while ignorant proletaires' may by slight causes become a horde of fiery insurgents. To let it be believed that the very existence of the peers as an order is knit up with a maintenance of landed principles and practice as they are, is surely a most suicidal proceeding. We deprecate everything that should base

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political reform on the hope of pecuniary benefit to the cultivators of the soil, and regret to hear Messrs. Bright and Cobden couple the two ideas; for it is dangerous to excite indefinite hopes of a selfish kind from organic changes. But far more do we deprecate a doctrine which solemnly warns the labouring millions that they shall not have any relief from a system of virtual serfdom-hopeless toil and helpless indigence as long as aristocracy and royalty stand in England. This is to kindle, not indefinite hopes, but definite hatred of existing institutions. For ourselves, we believe that no law on these subjects would be able to pass both Lords and Cominons after a reform of the Commons, if it be such as cannot possibly pass before a reform. When the movement of social industry takes the land as its element, and is obviously impeded by something in the existing laws, we do not believe that either House of Parliament, under the present organization, will insist on maintaining that impediment.

There is only one other topic on which we must touch before closing. Many write confidently, as though the system of peasant proprietors had been tried in modern England, and had failed: the diminution of small estates in the last century is treated as in itself a decisive indication that it cannot succeed. Yet, on the face of the matter, this is surely refuted by the experience of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and Guernsey. Such experience is too broad to be deceptive. There is nothing in England so unlike all these countries that what succeeds with them should be incapable of success with us. In fact, small freeholds which die out with us are not (as far as we are able to learn) those of petty cultivators, but rather may be called those of petty gentleman farmers.

Of

these a principal type is found in those who are called statesmen' in Cumberland. From an educated gentleman, whose grandfather was one of these statesmen, we learned that his patrimonial estate was of 130 acres, more than ten times the

size which suffices for a peasant who has to cultivate everything by his own labour. These statesmen need, of course, to hire labourers, as an ordinary farmer does. During the great French war they were very prosperous, and did not at its close suffer like the farmers from increased rents; but during their prosperity they probably learned expensive habits. The whole class everywhere is said to be highly conservative of old customs, and especially of the custom of hard drinking. Living as a class by itself, it has not partaken of the modern spiritual and

mental movement, and has had neither taste nor spirit for improved agriculture. Thus it has dwindled by its own vice or ignorance. From this degenerate class, perhaps, Mr. M'Culloch has drawn his picture of the idle and improvident petty proprietor. It may be that the owner of 100 or 150 acres is unable to stand in modern England; but if this be ever so true, it is no practical refutation of an institution so different as that of proprietors who hire no agricultural hands-an institution entirely successful over so large a breadth of Europe.

R. JOHNSON defines priestcraft

DR.

as 'religious frauds; management of wicked priests to gain power; and he gives no other meaning to the word. But surely if we recognize the existence of the priest at all, if we keep the word in our Bibles and Prayer-books, if there be a distinct class of men not only set apart for the performance of sacred duties and religious rites, but more fenced in and tied down to this work than the members of any other profession are to theirs, priestcraft must be a business. There must be a right and a wrong' way of doing priest-work-it must have some characteristic conversation and deportment. There must be honest priestcraft.

To make a beginning of the following thoughts about priestcraft, I will first ask whether the evil savour of the word expressed though not monopolized by Dr. Johnson, may not be traced to the people as much as to the priest? The multitude like a sacerdotal class, with its mysterious claims. They will have it. They are essentially Popish. The savage in the woods has his medicine-man, his ghostly soothsayer, his priest in paint and feathers, who pretends to hold the secrets of a malicious, irritable Deity, and have power with local devils. And in Christendom itself we see a great majority either affecting openly the Pope of Rome, or following some

PRIEST.

small spiritual tyrant who curses opponents in the vulgar tongue, and is permitted to exercise sacerdotal power if he will prove its unlawfulness; who retains the pulpit unmolested, and tells his flock what they ought to think as long as he upholds the theoretical independence of his hearers. Many Papists and Dissenters meet in the fact of their attaching an excessive importance to the ministrations of the pastor or priest. They agree in refusing to judge for themselves. They are uncomfortable till they have chosen respectively a minister or director. Meanwhile there is a large body which protests against the sweeping claims of Rome and the bitterness of little sectarians, and yet approves strongly of the performance of recognized religious rites by a distinct class. With this honest demand for it, there must be priestcraft proper. And as most men of all shades of opinion will have some one whom they can take as a guide, or at least quote as an authority in religious questions, whether he be preacher or writer, clerical or lay, no wonder that we find priestcraft improper. Nay, even the infidel, the scoffer, the rappist, has his philosopher, his favourite opponent of ecclesiastical influence, his authority in the things of the unseen, who is nothing else than a priest turned inside out. Talk of the Pope at Rome! what is he to