one cultivator to twenty-two acres of cultivated land, while in Jersey there is one to eleven, and in Guernsey one to seven acres. Yet the agriculture of these islands maintains besides cultivators, non-agricultural populations, respectively, four and five times as dense as that of Britain.'

British readers (farming readers at least) must be four or five times as dense' as philo-peasant-proprietary writers have any right to expect to find them, to be capable of taking statements such as these for facts. The late Earl of Rosse, in his pamphlet on Ireland, published in 1867,* gave the Statistical Returns of the Agricultural Stock and Produce imported into, and exported from, Jersey and Guernsey, from which it appears that the great bulk of the first necessaries of life consumed in those islands is procured, not from their petty culture, but by importation. Prosperous as they are-and still more have beenfrom maritime and commercial sources, they have no pretension to be self-supporting agricultural communities at all. Guernsey, with a population of 29,733, imports 34,330 quarters of wheat, and exports none-imports 1297 oxen, exports 41-imports 4980 sheep, exports 40. With these imports,' says Lord Rosse, 'Guernsey cannot stand much in need of corn raised at home; and although the peasantry require very little animal food, the wealthy inhabitants of St. Peter's Port and neighbourhood consume the usual quantity. Therefore a supply of meat has to be provided, in addition to the oxen and sheep imported, and, consequently, meadow, clover, and turnips, are the principal crops. In Jersey it is very much the same. So soon are fables dissipated by a little statistics. The peasant-proprietor is often employed as a lever by those who seek to turn society upside down; we see how weak that lever is when the truth is known.'

All the exclusive enthusiasts of peasant-proprietorship seem predestined to shipwreck on these same rocks of the Channel İslands. Mr. Cliffe Leslie, in his recently-published volume on 'Land Systems,' British and foreign, contrasts the Isle of Wight as having 'scarcely any commerce or shipping' with the Island of Jersey, carrying on trade with every quarter of the world.' He attributes the difference to the Island of Jersey being owned by small proprietors, and the Isle of Wight by large ones. Now, waiving the topographical circumstance that it might have been rather difficult to make trading ports of creeks like Brading Harbour, accessible only at high water-and only then to small craft-might it not have occurred to any one less in quest of agrarian arguments than our Irish professor, that 'every quarter

A Few Words on the Relation of Landlord and Tenant in Ireland,' &c. By the Earl of Rosse.

of the world' could more conveniently bring its trade to the mainland of Hampshire than to an outlying section of it insulated by a narrow channel? The Solent, to any one looking out from Ryde, shows no scarcity of commercial shipping; and the docks of Southampton might seem to dispense sufficiently with any necessity for cutting up little Vectis into big basins for ocean steamers. But if it is nothing but the lack of peasant-proprietors that diverts the trade of all the world from the direct access it would otherwise seek to the Isle of Wight, how is it that a like effect defective' does not extend to the rest of Great Britain? Here is England, on the one side, scant of peasant-proprietors, France, on the other side, swarming with them. Why does not England contrast as shabbily with France in international commerce, as Mr. Leslie laments that the Isle of Wight does with the Channel Islands? But really it is waste of time to combat what we should call such sheer puerilities if they proceeded from any source less officially respectable than the pen of a Professor of Political Economy' in a Queen's College and two Queen's Universities.

It may, however, be worth while to indicate for the benefit of those who need the information, how it has come to pass that the two principal Channel Islands have long maintained a population so much larger than their own agriculture had food for, and have long enjoyed an extent of commerce so much more than proportioned to the place their little rocky cluster fills on the map. The answer may be made in few words-because they have always had the privilege of carrying on a commerce entirely free from fiscal restrictions on the one hand with the neighbouring ports of the Continent, and on the other with the shipping and colonies of this country. Jersey and Guernsey had free ports and free trade, while Great Britain and Ireland still submitted themselves to the self-imposed fetters of anticommercial Corn Laws and Navigation Laws. By means of this privilege,' wrote the late Mr. Inglis in his book on the Channel Islands (published before the era of Free Trade had arrived in England), 'vessels are built (in Jersey) with foreign timber, are rigged with foreign cordage, yet have the advantage of British registers, and consequently enjoy all the advantages to trade secured to British-built vessels.' Again, while the protective Corn Laws obstructed the importation of grain and flour into this country, the Channel Islands could import foreign wheat for their own consumption at free-trade prices, and export to England what wheat they themselves grew, to benefit by protective prices. More than this, they could grind foreign grain, and sell the flour as a native manufacture to British shipping and

British

British colonies. Under such circumstances it required surely the blindness of enthusiasm for exclusive peasant-proprietorship to assign to that source the growth of the shipping and trading prosperity of the Channel Islands, just as it had required the intrepidity of that enthusiasm (to give it no harsher name), to describe those islands as terrestrial paradises of a dense population, entirely fed by a self-supporting agriculture on the system of la petite culture.

We cannot close our present remarks without some brief reference to continental views and proceedings on the subject of operative associations, and labour-regulations and theories. Those have been interrupted in their calm and regular development by the great war between France and Germany; but a portentous phenomenon which has followed in the train of that war-the insurgent apparition of the INTERNATIONAL, with its myriad incendiary hands, and tongues, and pens-terribly demonstrates how the speculative delusions palmed on popular ignorance may blaze out in more than metaphorical conflagrations kindled by popular fanaticism. Some years before proletaire absolutism fired its own funeral-pile in Paris, a rather remarkable instance was reported of that esprit prime-sautier in the French work people, which has rendered Parisian proletarism, from the first outbreak of the French Revolution to the present day, the ever ready and ever formidable instrument of political and social perturbations, unwillingly endured in their too frequent recurrence by the French nation at large, and now at length suppressed with a strong hand by the national armed force. A few years back, the English operative Internationals' tried to get their Parisian brethren to join in a grand combined strike. Why should we give ourselves any trouble about raising the rate of wages?'-was the reply of the latter to their comparatively practical English industrial corevolutionists' when we are just on the eve of suppressing wages altogether, and becoming our own employers-(nos propres patrons.')

It may be regarded as a somewhat noticeable sign of the times, that a recently reigning Emperor, and two rival pretenders to, or rival candidates for, the throne he so lately filled, should, within the last few years, have emulously exhibited in action or speculation their sympathies with the working classes, as their best title to sovereign power. Each, of course, exhibited those sympathies with a difference,' according to their respective positions and antecedents. The Ex-Emperor of the French laid claim to every grand idea of operative elevation in the social scale of the future, as an idée Napoléonienne. The Comte de Chambord, in a manifesto dated from Venice, 20th April, 1865, traced all the

ills that afflict the working classes to the 'individualism' engendered by the French Revolution, which, in his royal view, has been the parent of industrial monopoly and the abuse of competition. (To logicians of a less august order, monopoly and competition might seem contradictory terms.) The Comte de Paris, in his recent opuscule, entitled Les Associations Ouvrières en Angleterre,' kept in view, throughout, his political object of contrasting the liberties of England with the half-liberties of France under the Second Empire, and the illusory compensation for the substantial benefits of self-government held out by ostentatious official patronage of industrial interests.

The most remarkable fact of the present epoch, as regards this subject, is the abolition of the system of legal penalties against operative combinations, which is in course of being effected in Continental States-a system which in principle was abandoned in England nearly half a century back, at the epoch of the repeal of the old Combination Laws in 1824. Nothing remained to do in this country but what is just being done by Parliament-nothing but the 'crowning of the edifice' of operative emancipation. No objection is now opposed to the legislative recognition of the corporate existence and corporate rights of Trades' Unions, except their adherence to regulations adverse to the freedom and safety of the larger unorganized union of peaceful citizens and workers outside their pale. It is near half a century since legislation in this country abandoned its old untenable position, of proscribing all operative combinations as criminal. And the only limit the law now seeks to impose on the freedom of Trades' Unions is that of enforcing respect on their part for the equal freedom of the great majority of their non-unionist fellowwork people, who may continue to think fit, as hitherto they have thought fit, to stay out of the unions.

The Continent now stands just at the turning-point of industrial legislation at which we stood in 1824-it being also remembered that the liberty of meeting for any purpose is as new a concession, generally speaking, on the Continent, to every other class of citizens as to the working class. In 1842, when M. Leclaire-the Paris house-painter, since celebrated-first adopted in his own establishment the principle which is now assumed in high economical quarters to be universally applicable, of conceding a share of profits in his concern to a select portion of his workpeople-the government of Louis Philippe thwarted his project by refusing him the permission requisite to assemble his work people for the purpose of laying his plan before them. In Prussia and Austria, the law has hitherto punished, as formerly in England, with fine and imprisonment, any workman who

combined

combined with his fellows for the purpose of obtaining concessions from their employer by striking work. Similar legislation has been in force in Belgium and the other smaller states. Operative emancipation is achieving itself almost suddenly in continental Europe, and is producing phenomena if not of lawlessness in action equal to some of our unions, yet of far more Utopian extravagance in speculation-as witness the doctrines promulgated at the International Labour-Congresses of late years. Wages have been indignantly characterized as an humiliation to labour-capital as a hostile power, when in any other than Labour's hands. It has been loudly proclaimed to be the foremost duty of the State to set operative productive associations on their legs by lavish subsidies at the public charge; and the doctrines of the late Ferdinand Lassalle, the apostle of State-support to co-operative societies, are articles of economic faith among large numbers of the working population in Northern and Southern Germany. In short it is clear that continental proletarism, breaking from its old fetters, will wage an internecine war against property and social order.

Lorsque le faible devient fort,' impressively writes M. Edmond About, lorsque l'opprimé devient libre, son premier mouvement n'est pas d'user, mais d'abuser. Déliez les mains d'un brave homme enchaîné sans cause légitime: il ne jettera pas la chaine, il la ramassera avec soin pour l'attacher aux mains de celui qui la lui a donnée. S'il agissait autrement, il ne serait pas un homme, mais un ange.'

ART. IX.-1. The Elementary Education Act, 1870.

2. Minute of the Right Honourable the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council on Education, establishing a new Code of Regulations, 1871.

3. The School Board Chronicle, Nos. I.-XX. February to July,

1871.

4. The Sixtieth Report of the National Society, 1871.

THE

HE period which has elapsed since we last called attention to the elementary education of the people,† has been one of unexampled educational activity. The Education Act had then just been introduced into the House of Commons; now, after passing through an ordeal of fierce discussion and emerging with

* A, B, C, du Travailleur,' p. 151.

† In April, 1870. considerable