On the other hand, as Macaulay expresses it: "The Roman Catholics of Lower Canada remain inert, while the whole continent around them is in a ferment with Protestant activity and enterprise."

This, then, is the old order which is giving place to the new. It could not continue as it has done, were it not linked with the good government and secular liberty secured by the Dominion constitution and the ultimate supremacy of the British Empire. Each of the rival principles of government and of social life appear to the best advantage when held in check and put upon its good behaviour by its contrary. In Quebec you see that of the Church and old conservatism in a favourable aspect, just as the Kingdom of Naples showed it at its worst at the end of the last century and as late as the middle of this. The new order, too, may learn something even from the old. It may learn that there are principles which are active in human nature and which powerfully influence human conduct, which do not centre all in the enjoyments of this life; that to ignore these in any scheme of human government is to ignore a large part of man; and that there may be a contentment, even under privations, which no amount of the goods of this life will alone secure, as the discontent and unhappiness of many of the rich among us abundantly proves.

CHAPTER IV.

ENGLAND.

My return to England was after an absence, with one short interval, of thirty years. Coming back after such a time, changes attract the attention more than if you had grown up among them; just as a stranger notices the alterations in a family more readily than do they of the household. What first and most impressed me was the alteration in the attitude of many, if not the majority, of working men towards the State and towards politics, merely as politics. I by no means include the whole of the working classes. An ardent labour leader told me that their direct followers numbered only about one-fourth of the workers of England. But without doubt, not only among these, but among many who disclaim Socialism, the tone of thought and feeling that now prevails is not only changed, but is in marked contrast to that of thirty years ago. Then, great was Radicalism; and John Bright was its prophet. All men were struggling for votes, and for the ballot to make them free. Cobden and his school were still held in esteem. Mill declared that the problem of our times was the establishment of democracy upon intelligent lines. Some of the finest platform speeches ever delivered were made by Bright, as he swayed excited thousands by denouncing the wrong Englishmen suffered in being denied votes in their own land; while they, if they went abroad to Canada, the United States, to the

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colonies, were at once welcomed to the full rights of the citizen. The power of voting was then prized, a thing valuable in itself, and destined, in conjunction with general education, to place the working man upon a vantage-ground from which he could mould his own. career. For Bright was a resolute Individualist. He was the very anti-type of a Socialist. He had even opposed the Ten Hours Bill. All he asked from the State was that it would leave him alone; though latterly he agreed to municipalities undertaking some kinds of work that used to be left to private hands. It was true that the claims of labour to better treatment and plans for ameliorating the lot of the poor, had been advanced from time to time from the beginning of the century. In 1825 a Committee of the House of Commons reported that the greatest part of the manufacturing labour of England was under the dominion of associations that sought to subvert "the natural relation between the employers and the employed." In the history of Trade Unionism by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, the reformer Francis Place is quoted as representing the condition of England in 1833 in terms that might be used not inaptly to describe the feelings and objects of the advanced party now; the new element being that they seek to secure their aims, not by their own action, but by the power of the political authority. He says: "The year (1833) ended, leaving the (National) Union (of the Working Classes) in a state of much depres sion. The nonsensical doctrines preached by Robert Owen and others respecting communities and goods in common; abundance of everything man ought to desire, and all for four hours' labour out of twenty-four; the right of every man to his share of the earth in common, and his right to whatever his hands had been employed upon; the power of masters under the present system to give just what wages they pleased; the right of the labourer to such wages as would maintain him and his in comfort for eight or ten hours' labour; the right of every man who was unemployed to employment, and

to such an amount of wages as have been indicatedand other matters of a similar kind which were continually inculcated by the working-men's political unions, by many small knots of persons, printed in small pamphlets and handbills, which were sold twelve for a penny and distributed . . . . among the working people. These pamphlets were written almost wholly by men of talent and of some standing in the world, professional men, gentlemen, manufacturers, tradesmen, and men called literary. The consequence was that a very large proportion of the working people in England and Scotland became persuaded that they had only to combine, as it was concluded they might easily do, to compel, not only a considerable advance of wages all round, but employment for every one, man and woman, who needed it, at short hours. This motion induced them to form themselves into Trades Unions in a manner and to an extent never before known."

But the idea of appealing to the Government for help in the difficulties of life, and the belief in plans for upturning the social state as being the true remedy, were equally discredited among Englishmen. Independence and self-help were their motto. The Socialists of those days asked for no Government aid; Robert Owen and his friends worked on for themselves on their own lines. The Christian Socialists of thirty years ago, while bitterly condemning the Manchester school, yet disclaimed State aid and tenaciously clung to self-help. It was only the old Tories that were for Government interference. Statesmen and political economists were alike emphatic in condemning what is advocated now by those who claim to be progressive. Bentham, the father of the advanced political thought of our day, and who supported the Household Suffrage and Vote by Ballot in the early part of the century, yet stoutly maintained that private enterprise was the mainspring of the social system. A brilliant Whig of the first Reform days declared that what men would come out and fight for, was equal rights to unequal possessions."

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Cobden said that he would rather live in a country where the feeling in favour of individual freedom was jealously cherished, than possess all the principles of the French Constituent Assembly. Mill pronounced that a people who looked to its Government to direct them in their joint concerns would have their faculties only half developed. Fawcett, in my time an "advanced" Liberal, said that poverty "was mainly due to improvidence," and adds, "in trade congresses and other such assemblies ominous sounds are beginning to be heard that the State should find work for the unemployed. What does this mean, but that upon the prudent and thrifty should be thrown an ever-increasing burden created by improvidence?

As late as 1878, Mr. Gladstone, writing in “Kin Beyond Sea," of the English and American nations, declared that "they set a high value on liberty for its own sake. They desire to give full scope to the principle of self-reliance in the people, and they deem self-help to be immeasurably superior to help in any other form."

In 1873, so competent an authority as Mr. Chamberlain formulated the demands of the then Labour party to be these three :-The amendment of the law of conspiracy, the alteration of certain clauses. in the Crime Law Amendment Act, and the abolition of imprisonment for breach of contract.

Nor were these views confined to the governing or the learned classes. They were held with equal firmness by the working classes. Until quite a recent period, the Trade Unions were pronounced supporters of the principles of self-reliance and individualism. Proposals for State interference and Government control, they resented. Even in 1888 the International Trade Unions' Congress declined to pass a resolution in favour of the Eight Hours Law. It is thus tersely put in Webb's History of Trades Unionism: "Laissez faire, then, was the political and social creed of the Trade Union leaders of this time. Up to 1885 they un