any trade are limited by the Trades' Union-are bound down to the lowest limit of their productiveness. Now, it is at once conformable to reason and science, that the greater the productive ability of any class, other things being equal, the greater is the prosperity of that class; but the union laws say the lowest capability shall be the measure of labour; therefore the Trades' Union is injurious to the working class. But we have said they deteriorate the quality of the products of labour. This follows as a necessary consequence of the law which makes the meanest capacity to labour equal with the highest and most cultivated skilful workman. When the lowest is made the standard of excellence, all abilities are dragged down to the lowest level; all inducements for effort are withdrawn ; all the incentives suggested by emulation, advancement, and honour are withheld; universal deterioration are the natural and necessary consequence.

Trades' Unions keep numbers of workmen in a state of unproductiveness as their officers, and expend the fruits of labour in an unproductive manner. The salaries, fees, and support of these officers are so much drawn from the income of the labourer, and they are expended upon objects not only not productive, but positively injurious to the labourer, as they are chiefly directed towards curbing productiveness, and expended upon matters inimical to the well-being of the labourer, for whom they are ostensibly employed. Trades Unions restrain the accumulation of capital. Now capital and its accumulations is the fund from which labour is necessarily paid. Whatever, therefore, tends to restrain the accumulation of capital, must of necessity be injurious to the working man; for it must be self-evident to all that the greater the fund available for the payment of labour, the more prosperous must be the condition of the labourer; and that the operatives of Trades' Unions do necessarily restrain the accumulation of capital is equally self-evident, if we only consider the spirit of antagonism to capital which is the foundation principle of all Trades' Unions. They constantly exhibit capital to the workman as the hydra-headed evil against which all their efforts and energies are to be directed; they uniformly seek to indoctrinate the workman with the notion that capital is the source of all the wrongs and miseries to which the workman is subjected, forgetful of the old fable, of the boy who killed the goose which laid golden eggs, thinking thereby to have all the golden eggs at once; he rued his folly when too late, and we fear the dupes of Trades' Union mongers in many instances have shared in a more miserable disappointment, because they have been victims of a sadder practical folly.

In fine, Trades' Unions are the curse of the social life of the people. The society man feels himself to be everlastingly under the surveillance of his fellows. He dare not speak, he dare not act, he cannot work, but according to the arbitrary rules of the secret committee. A system of espionage of the most oppressive character is ever surrounding him; fines, penalties, and suspensions

dog him at every step, at every act, at every word. Where can slavery and tyranny to equal this be found? Political tyranny of class over class calls for just and indignant reprobation from every Englishman; but social degradation is suffered by the workman of England from his fellows, through the medium of Trades' Unions, without repugnance, without a murmur; nay, is even loved and cherished with all the earnestness due to a great blessing. Infatuation parallel to this is not to be found on the face of the whole earth.

Let it not be thought, for one moment, we have hastily expressed crude thoughts and prematurely formed judgments. We would appeal to the enlightened portion of the working classes themselves for confirmation of our views. Our experience has led us to a practical acquaintance with the formation, conduct, and effects of Trades' Unions. We have both seen and felt the evil of that spirit of antagonism, which is the constituent element of Trades' Unions. We have, in the formation of Trades' Unions, laboured to annihilate this evil spirit, by an endeavour to embody masters and men, the capitalist and the labourer, in a union for the protection of their trade; and all our efforts to secure unity of interest, purpose, and action with perfect mutuality, have been ineffectual, although ably and heartily supported by the wise and the good of both classes, the one source and sole cause of failure having uniformly been this spirit of antagonism. We, therefore, are led to the conclusion that until men, both capitalists and labourers, are thoroughly convinced -not theoretically convinced, for we remember that

"He who is convinced against his will,

Retains his old convictions still,"

but practically convinced-that whatever is good for the master is good for the man; whatever makes the capitalist to prosper makes the labourer to prosper; that capital and labour prosper and decline together;-until, we say, this is heartily believed by the great masses of the people, Trades' Unions are, and must continue to be, injurious to the whole community, but more especially will they manifest themselves as the curse of the working man.

We have spoken the honest convictions of our own hearts. If we have erred, we shall be happy to be set right by others better informed, or more highly gifted, than ourselves. Our experience in such matters has been long and large; we have slowly come to our conclusions; we could wish they were otherwise. Such as they are, we entreat the young men of our nation thoughtfully to consider the subject before committing themselves to any active participation in the tyranny and oppression of Trades' Unions.

L'OUVRIER.

The Essayist.

IN MEMORIAM MDCCCLIX.

SINCE 1832-when the myriad-minded Goethe; the mighty jurist, Bentham; the naturalist, Čuvier, and "the wizard wight" of Abbotsford, were called from among men-Death has made no swoop over the fields of literature and science so fell as that for which 1859 has to mourn. Over the closing year of the preceding decade, a dirge-note was fittingly sung, for during its currency Hartley Coleridge, the weird and wayward rhythmist; Elliott, the corn-law rhymer; Tytler, the Scottish historian; the industrious Maunder; the cautious utilist of imagination, Maria Edgeworth; and Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, were withdrawn from visible form, and became the subjects

"Of the stern agony, the shroud, the pall,

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house."

The quantitative loss was greater then, but the qualitative loss will bear no comparison with that which we have suffered. The opening months of 1850, too, in the demise of Jeffrey and Wordsworth, gave ominous presage of the future; while the decease of Talfourd and Wilson, Lockhart and James Montgomery, Kitto and Forbes, made 1854 sadsome and gloomy. Subsequent years have peopled the cold, silent, companionless house of Death with Samuel Rogers, Charlotte Brontë, and C. J. Hare (1855); the keenthoughted, multi-learned Sir William Hamilton; the observant Buckland; Miller, the Shakespeare of geology (1856); ingenious Conybeare, scholastic Bloomfield; Jerrold, the earnest wit, and Croker, the unsparing satirist (1857); Combe, Ford, and Hayward (1858); but 1859 has had the bearded grain of genius and learning remorselessly put to the sickle.

That year was but young when Henry Hallam, more worn out even by the griefs of private life than by the sedulous studies of long years, found a sepulchre in the chancel of Clevedon Church, beside" the babbling Wye," and followed his "nearest and dearest" to "the gathering in the heavens." He had long before bound up his sheaves and folded his hands from labour; for Destiny, in some fit of strange unkindness, had made him, like Burke, "live in an inverted order: they who ought to have succeeded him had gone before him." He attained the age of 81. His eldest son (on whom Alfred Tennyson composed "In Memoriam," the noblest Morte d'Arthur in the range of poetry) little more than completed his 23rd year, and his youngest son predeceased him in 1850. He bitterly experienced the saddest evil of a long life-to be left alone. We had no more to hope for him; he was bowed and broken, waiting in

silent foresight for the summons of "Death, the skeleton ;" and surely he heard a voice saying, "Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella, -Depart in peace, soul blessed and beautiful."

The children of his intellect, however, while the great ages_roll onward, shall be his witnesses to posterity. As a student of Eton and Oxford, he acquired his Byronic designation " Classic Hallam;" in the Edinburgh Review he won his early honours, and in his "View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages" (1818); "The Constitutional History of England, from Henry VII. to George II." (1827); and the "Introduction to the Literature of Europe (1838), he proved himself to be one of the nobles of the court of wisdom-profound, impressive, grave, masterly, logical, and perspicuous. His works are more critical of principles than of men; their truthfulness, their stern justice, their accuracy in fact and inference, have scarcely ever been impugned. Neither the massive learning, the manifold reading, the pure and melodious repose, the condensed succinctness of style, the self-possessed superiority to personal feeling, the calm, judicial dispassionateness they display, marvellous though they all are, mark him out as the possessor of the might and majesty of mind, so much as his clear-sighted exposition of the true underlying force of all political motion or stability -reflective thought; and his constant observance of the glory due to those innovators from whom new (if beneficial) manifestations of spiritual power proceeded. The surface phenomena of life-the crust and husk of history-occupied his attention less than the grand sources of change and progress thought, education, and religiousness. He is a thinker for thinkers, and a man whose influence might become "a lever to uplift the earth.”

Ill news travels quickly," and we had scarcely heard of the closing of Hallam's grave, when the language of regret and grief reached us from the Western world. There William H. Prescott had been, with stunning abruptness, palsied by Death, among his books and his labours, leaving one everlasting fragment. In semi-blindness, for an accident to his eyesight marred the execution, though it did not change the nature, of those high aims which, in the prime of every faculty, he had formed, he worked with an industry from which ordinary men shrink, and enlivened the dusky day of his life by the vigorous efforts of an enthusiastic mind, and of an imagination of considerable reach, power, and fervour. Though, fortunately, inheriting from his father, a lawyer and judge of some eminence, a moderate competency, he scorned the ignoble luxury of indolence or self-indulgence, and has added to the sumless wealth of literature treasures of no small worth. He is not only a master in the art of narrative, and a graphic delineator of events; he is also a clearminded expositor of causes, and a captivating unraveller of the tangled skeins of motive and intent. Copious and exact in references, impartial in judgment, and fluent and trustworthy in his relation of facts, he is a historian whose enduring fame is certain. "Ferdinand and Isabella" (1838) is minute yet comprehensive, bears few traces

of the elaborate compilation it received, and is replete with various interest. The Conquest of Mexico (1843), while less attractive in subject, is in breadth, brilliancy. and beauty of descriptive writing, as striking and charming. The Conquest of Peru (1847) is well-told and exact; and Philip II., though unfinished, exhibits the author's ordinary lucidity of statement, artistic grouping, industrious research, and free-handed style of pictorial descriptiveness. He was only sixty-three when Death brought the message of Destiny, and touched him into immortality.

The buds of April were greening near Cannes while De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of the United States, strove against the unlovely hand which came to arrest his grasp at greatness. His thoughtful and suggestive work, entitled Democracy in America (1835-1840), has acquired citizenship through translation into the literature of every country in Europe. It has not only been crowned by the Académie Francaise, but by the appreciative admiration of many of the wisest statesmen of Europe. It is weighty in thought, vigorous, and well composed, honest, unflattering, and unfaltering, full of acute discussion, rich in observations on men, nations, morals, laws, political systems, and the tendencies of the times. He is worthy of welcome to the fellowship of our souls, not in hours of leisure only, but in hours of study too. He was an honest as well as a distinguished statesman; and his demise, aged fifty-three, ought not to be a cause of regret to France alone, but to Europe and America.

Dr. Dionysius Lardner, though only sixty-six, had added to the library of self-instructors many a valuable tome. His adroitness and tact in popularizing the most recondite themes was all but unique. There was no fascination in his style, except the simplicity and clearness with which he unfolded the truths of science,-almost free from formula, but distinct and comprehensible to the merest tyro. In an age when such demands for the enlightenment of the Lasses are made, he was a most serviceable pioneer in the mazes and intricacies of science and art; and his multifarious writings possess not only an intrinsic value, but this extrinsic recommendation. His industry was almost a marvel; and the extensive range of study, of which he has become the expositor, is a monument itself, which will preserve his name from mingling, like his frame, with perishing things.

66

The ageless Lady Morgan, vivacious if not frolicsome, chatty, genial, talented, and racy, was a novelist and traveller's tale teller, whose works entitle her to mention and regret,-to mention, as a woman of great personal influence, of unflagging perseverance and esprit, who had the capacity, as she chose, to make the sad man merry, the benevolent one melt into tears ;"-to regret, as one who, though possessing and employing great natural gifts of wit and wisdom, failed to inform them with a lofty and holy purpose, and to distinguish, till near its close, at the age of eighty, between life a masquerade and life a tragedy. The curtain has fallen with its