ers.

should be employed in hunting foxes than in hunting natives. Yet we cannot suppress reflections also concerning those vast outlying possessions of England which are comparatively stagnant and unproductive for want of the populations which would furnish a field for the energies of just such men. Crowded and cramped in our overgrown cities, forming centres of disease and moral corruption, turning the struggle for existence into a chronic war of class against class-here are the people. Across the seas are vast fertile fields untamed, calling for labourNot only have we the labourers, for whom there is here no place, but men capable of being active leaders, youths brave and intelligent, many of whom would rejoice in helping to build up and to defend new and solid English nations in colonies which now show only a few straggling settlements, which are at once sources of disgrace and danger. Horses, foxes, and drags ought hardly to be the chief end of a cultivated man's life even for two years, however appropriate they may be as the incidental pleasures of existence. The effacement of England,' of which we have been hearing so much lately, is not likely to result from this country's refusal to interfere in mad struggles with which she has little or no real concern if the phrase should ever come to express a truth, it will be because we are wasting in the demoralisation of idle barracks, or diverting into a perpetual pursuit of wild animals at home and abroad, the energies of the nation, instead of devoting them to the large human task of furthering civilisation and the welfare of mankind in regions entrusted to our keeping.

Meanwhile, until we have a Government capable of recognising the further destinies of the country,

and cutting out for the Holy Boys more serious work, we take their side against Pecksniff & Co. most decidedly. We have a strong sus picion that if the young men in question were not pursuing their semi-barbarous sports at Yokohama and similar stations, they would be spinning out in some pulpit the string of texts politely called a sermon, begun several hundreds of years ago and destined to be droned on for several hundreds more; they would be dozing in the House of Commons, they would be yawning in clubs, they would be lounging or debauching themselves in Continental capitals—and in effect chanting the dismal refrain of labourers who've got no work to do.'

Lord Softdown, remaining in London, with no care be yond his evening's feast and no grief beyond his morning's indigestion, is a man only so far as his tailor has invested him with the costume of one; but let fate send Lord Softdown to the jungles of India, or the fields of Japan, and this nobleman will go without a good dinner for a week, will clean his own clothes, cook his own food, sleep under his saddle, and meet you with manly look and laughter worthy of an ancient Norseman. That such training of limbs and senses-nay, of endurance, natural intelligence, indifference to trivial discomforts, and fertility of resource-should be ultimately lavished on the 'brush,' is truly a lame and impotent conclusion. It will hardly, however, oppress the minds of our young sportsmen until our philosophers and statesmen shall have been moved thereby to consider whether it be not feasible to send out our youth on missions other than to gain for England a reputation as the Nimrod of nations.

HOW

THE WORKING MAN'S

OW to prevent wages from falling below the living point, or the zero of the labour thermometer ? How to make employment easily findable at all times and seasons? How to cure and prevent pauperism ?-are various forms of the Working Man's Political Question, to which an effective answer requires to be given.

Before attempting to prescribe remedies for a social grievance, it may be advisable to advert for a moment to the supposed causes of the evil. Insufficient wages and pauperism have for primary or root causes general ignorance on the part of the lower classes, and lack of suitable knowledge on the part of both electors and representatives; and for secondary causes, unwise laws, branching out into bad social customs, and unregulated individual passions and vicious habits, the fruit of the tree being criminals, lunatics, abandoned women, vagrants, drunkards, neglected children, premature invalids, paupers, and operatives in casual distress. If this diagnosis of the disease be correct, the primary or root remedies indicated are, education and industrial training for the lower classes, and special schooling in social science for legislators. The secondary remedies and the modes of dealing with the fruit of this upas tree are not so clearly indicated. The public-house branch, the overtrading and fast-living branches, the branch which produces the great social evil,' the baneful branch which fills the prison, and the luxuriant branch which overcrowds the workhouse, all seem to require special as well as general treatment. But if all neglected children received a good industrial training and were well able to read and write, and if all our legislators were chosen by intelligent and unbribe

6

POLITICAL QUESTION.

able voters, not on account of their volubility of speech, nor in consequence of their wealth and social position, but because of their special aptitude or skill in constructing social machinery suitable to the wants of the age, we might reasonably hope to discover both secondary and sovereign remedies for the various evils which afflict society. In our past attempts at social reform we have generally over-rated the immediate, and under-rated the primary causes of the evil to be removed; hence, instead of laying the axe at the root of the tree, we have expended the greater part of our strength in merely pruning its most prominent branches.

po

To diminish the pressure of verty upon a sober population, to provide sufficiently paid work for every arm, and for the greatest number of arms an encouraging marriage law could possibly produce, easily accessible highways between labour and capital, inexpensive labour-removing machinery,

cheap trains across the ocean,' the constant development and multiplication of labour markets, and the active circulation of money in reproductive channels, are indispensable. We have committed another error in allowing purely local agents to deal with national evils. If our assumption of the causes of pauperism is correct, it follows that a pauper is the product of unwise laws, and therefore the common property, not of his fellow-parishioners, but of all who share in the work of national legislation. Suppose, for example, that extensive works of public utility were to be erected in the parish of St. George'sin-the-East, that several thousand workmen had to be imported from a distance in order to complete them within a specified time, and that

these workmen were ultimately thrown out of employment in an overcrowded labour market with no means of their own to convey them where their labour could be made productive, the result would be congestion of the social system, loss of labour force, and such an increase of local destitution as the parish authorities could not cope with.

We are being gradually forced to concede that local self-government is not so desirable as national selfgovernment when national grievances have to be dealt with, and that the vestry management of public affairs is incompatible with highly perfected social machinery. Men in their primitive condition build their own homes, manufacture their own clothing, and are governed on the patriarchal or tribal system. As they advance in the path of civilisation a division of labour takes place concurrently with an alteration in the character of the governing power, which widens and expands with increasing knowledge. The system of divided labour is appreciated and carried to some perfection in the making of a needle, a watch, and a steel pen. In social and political affairs the same tendency towards a higher degree of perfection is at work, and as social machinery becomes more complicated it demands a minuter division of social labour, specially qualified social engineers, and the centralisation of national business. The amateur social engineer, or vestry politician-who may be fairly able to perform the work of repairing the parish clock-is apt to look with suspicion on centralisation, and to consider it an approach towards despotism. But centralisation applied to the conduct of national affairs in a free country, where power is in the hands of the people, is synonymous with national self-government in the fullest and widest sense of that term. The question, however, is not Centralisation versus Local Self-government.

There are national, local, and individual duties to be performed in connection with social affairs; and the question is, How ought these duties to be defined?

Whatever may be the defects connected with the French system of dealing with the poor, the French mode of treating vagrants is worthy of commendation. It has been called a system of penal detention; it would be more appropriate to term it a system of fatherly care, and to designate ours a system of penal license or parental neglect. The English vagrant is encouraged to beg, tempted to steal, has the right of entrée into the Casual Ward, the privilege of wandering about homeless and half-clad, and the liberty of dying by inches in the streets. The Frenchman of the same type is provided with work and compelled to accept a home. Unfortunately the French fail to appreciate the fact that a healthy child is the most intrinsically valuable of all productions. Hence their social machinery, though well adapted for the treatment of one social sore, produces others of greater magnitude, for which neither curative nor preventive remedies are provided.

To under-estimate the value of a healthy child is also a common mistake in England. If slavery were established throughout the world, and a slave market at Charing Cross, the healthy child of destitute English parents would certainly not be considered a parish burden. Is there, then, no way of making freeborn children profitable, in a pecuniary sense, except by rearing some of them for the slaughter-house of the battle-field, or by encouraging late marriages, prostitution, and premature deaths? If a destitute boy is trained to be a skilled productive workman, does he not become a pillar of strength to the nation? If neglected, does he not become a burden and a nuisance?

If an

orphan girl is made thoroughly efficient in the work of the laundry and the kitchen and enabled to marry some lonely dweller in the Australian Bush, does she not help to amend the artificially created disparity of the sexes-that fruitful parent of grave evils-and, by becoming a mother when she would otherwise remain unmarried, does she not create an additional family of customers for the looms of England, a little army of waste-mutton eaters, better extractors of the essence of meat than the 'Liebig's Company, Limited'? If neglected, does she not become a prostitute and a pauper? If these queries are answered in the affirmative the question arises, Why do we burden ourselves with what ought to be one of our chief supports? Why do we derive weakness from that which ought to produce strength ? Is it not because we put the saddle on the wrong horse, and expect charitable individuals, or sections of the community, to do work which properly belongs to the nation ?

The possession of a gold mine may be of no value to the owner, because of his inability to find capital and skilled labour to make it productive. Unwise laws may render parents unable to support and instruct their offspring, and cause parishes to be overburdened with paupers. But every well-managed civilised nation --and England in particular-possesses the means of making every child born within its borders a profitable instrument in developing national wealth and strength. To neglect to use such means is sometimes justified on the plausible but untenable ground that the assumption, by the nation, of the duties of bad or unfortunate parents would induce parents in general to become neglectful and wicked. But wise educational laws would in the end have no such effect, but the opposite.

No nation can be in a thoroughly

thriving condition unless it is constantly adding to its population, and, like the bees, periodically casting off young and vigorous hives of humanity. In a healthy state of society the birth-rate should greatly exceed the death-rate, and this excess-which ought to be much greater than it is in England— represents the amount of surplus labour or living wealth the nation has available for reproductive employment, for export, and for manufacturing purposes.

An increase of population is only an evil when a nation lacks brains. Knowledge ought to produce wise laws, and, while an acre of waste land or waste sea exists, wise laws ought to multiply productive labour-fields as rapidly as population. One of our gravest errors-arising from the want of an efficient parent or owner for neglected children-consists in not rearing the human article most in demand. Good wives are wanted in our colonies, but with 500,000 surplus females, we have apparently none to spare; good domestic servants are wanted everywhere, we have few to offer; stout hearts and strong muscles are in demand in Canada and elsewhere, our labour markets are either crowded with drunken or diseased specimens, or we have no available means of a cheap and self-sustaining character suitable for conveying the proper article to the desired destination. We possess the best raw material in the world for the manufacture of ploughmen and fishermen, yet, judging by the operation of our laws, we seem to prefer the manufacture of pickpockets and paupers to the production of skilled work

men.

Assuming that healthy human beings are the most intrinsically valuable of all productions, and that the wealth and strength of a State are in proportion to the number of its productive workmen, the

principal social problems requiring solution are these. (1) How can a healthy, vigorous, and educated population be most rapidly and safely increased? (2) How can the greatest amount of usefulness be extracted from a given number of men? (3) How can the maximum amount of food be raised from a given quantity of land? (4) How can surplus population or emigration force-the best test of a nation's vitality-be most efficiently distributed? and (5) How can the existing useless, semi-useless, and worse than useless portion of the population be reduced in number, improved in quality and condition, and made self-supporting?

Ist. As the growth of population already advances more rapidly than social reform, it is unnecessary to enter into this branch of the subject.

With regard to the second question referred to, our past policy has been to permit or encourage much of the capital which ought to have been invested in developing the bones and brains of a free-born native and colonial population to flow into the hands of nations who directly or indirectly use it in maintaining large standing armies. And we have freely and gratuitously poured into the United States shipload after shipload of what is more valuable to a nation than the precious metals. Such a policy must necessarily increase pauperism in this country, which is without organised machinery for distributing surplus population; which has no efficient parent or owner for neglected children; and which is destitute of laws calculated to counteract the various social evils engendered through the natural selfishness of individuals. For example, men generally strive to be able to set the principles of political economy at defiance. They work, not only that they may be able to do without working if it so please

them, but that they may be able to maintain a large retinue of nonproductive individuals to minister to their artificial wants. It should be the object of social legislation to counteract this selfish evil and pauperising tendency of human nature. Take the case of A, B, and C, married men with a fixed income of 1,000l. a year each. A lives quietly, keeps only one girl to assist in household work, and invests his savings on state security in developing the natural resources of the empire. B imitates A in his mode of living, but resides abroad for his own pleasure, and invests his savings in a foreign country with a hostile tariff and a large standing army, more or less liable to be used in inflicting injuries on our nation. C lives up to, or beyond his income, keeps six servants, three horses, and two dogs. Assuming that A's conduct would tend to elevate the lower classes and enrich the nation; that B's might or might not enrich himself, but would not diminish pauperism; and that C's would multiply paupers in some sort of proportion to the pecuniary value of the labour of six servants, and the food of three horses and two dogs,-what is the duty of the State towards A, B, and C in a pecuniary sense?

Taxation, as generally understood, is a political blunder. An Income tax operates unequally, unfairly, unjustly. A tax on well-managed property restrains enterprise, and indirect taxes are the most injurious of any. Scarcity of productive work is the result of misemployed capital and unemployed national credit. Taxation is rendered necessary solely because many people neglect property, misuse capital, abuse privileges, misdirect labour; and we contend that, as the proceeds of an adequate tax on the guilty would be sufficient for ordinary revenue purposes, none but the guilty should be liable to taxa