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High prices will not make high rents, if the skill is undeveloped. Nor will they if the skill is lost. If wheat rose in England to 50s. a quarter, and other kinds of grain proportionately, economic rent would not increase in any notable degree, unless the skill and capital of the existing generation of agriculturists were induced to compete for occupancy. The rise in prices might arrest the bankruptcy of some who are struggling under their self-imposed burdens, but it would not recall, of necessity, a single sovereign to the soil, or set in motion a single competitive farmer. People are amazed that land of good average fertility is gone out of cultivation, that there is no inquiry for it, and under the old system there seems likely to be no inquiry, even though it be offered at nominal rents, on long leases, and with discretionary tillage. It is not that it could not be cultivated with a profit under such conditions, provided capital and skill were forthcoming, but it is that capital and skill have been extinguished by the rents which kept rising from 1852 to 1873. Landowners who want to let land are crying in the desert. The economical conditions are intelligible enough to those who understand economic laws and economic causes. The conditions of agriculture in England are at least equal to those of the United States, the freight from which, as I learn from the authority of American public reports is at least, in these times of cheap transport, 9s. a quarter, or about one-seventh of a penny per ton per mile. The soil of the United Kingdom is better, the climate better, the possibilities of high farming better; for all root crops must be housed in autumn in the United States, and carefully kept from the severe frosts of the country. The insect plagues of the United Kingdom are as nothing by the side of those which afflict farmers in the United States. But land in England is going out of cultivation. I hope that I have explained the reason. The remedy is one on the exposition of which I have much inclination, but no time to enter. It is quite certain that it does not reside in the artificial restoration of high prices.

XIII.

DOMESTIC MANUFACTURES.

The numerous early conquests of England-The advantages of the island's natural position-Slowness of England in the arts, industrial and other-The skill of the agriculturist—The iron and salt works-Brick-making-Paper-Textile industries—The size of the English farms-The insulated character of English lifeThe density of the Flemish population-The ruin of continental industry-The development of English industry in manufacture and agriculture-The condition of Europe in 1763—The theory of a sole market-The effect of modern wars.

ENGLAND is not inhabited by a naturally inventive nation. We read a good deal in certain books which, while purporting to give us an account of our race, have uttered a thousand plausible flatteries, intended to be soothing to our insular feelings, and to assist our industrial Chauvinism, about the greatness and progressive power of the Anglo-Saxon people. Some of these authors, if they get to learn it, find that the Anglo-Saxon race had not unity enough to protect England against invasions like their own, and had to succumb to Danish rovers, much more rapidly and hopelessly than the British races yielded to them. Then they talk of "the Making of England," and treat us to generalities as to how the Norman invader, who made even shorter work of the English than the Dane did, induced upon the English race those habits of law and order which have made us the envy of nations. But the barons of the Conquest exterminated each other in Stephen's reign, and the Plantagenet conquest is as real as the Norman, which it followed. I am almost weary of the philosophy of history. It is become to me

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as unreal as alchemy and astrology or metaphysics. You who, for inscrutable reasons, have to get up so-called history, and be examined in it, will, I trust, find it wise to learn what I am convinced, as time goes on, you will find it even wiser to forget. Law and order! We have deposed more kings than any other European race, and, excepting Russia, have murdered more, or, at any rate, have acquiesced in their deposition and murder.

The English race, I must confess, who am the descendant of centuries of English life, and that of the wildest, for I come of a Northumbrian stock, with a judicious admixture of other nationalities, invented very few things in the mechanical sense. It contributed but little, of its own effort, to that progress which lessens cost by invention, by the adaptation of natural laws to the process which manipulates matter and turns it into utility. The English had greater advantages of position than Flanders had. They were fairly free from foreign attack. Their nobles were glad to turn their swords into reaping-hooks. The peace was kept at home, and every one was interested in keeping it. The temptation to shear sheep, with a perpetual market for the produce, was great. Now the peace cannot be kept, unless every one tries to keep it, they who could afford to break it with impunity most of all. Besides, they are certainly most competent for national defence, who can spare for foreign aggression. For a hundred years our kings, with the sympathies of the people, strove to conquer France. Once they almost dismembered it; once they almost conquered it. If Henry V. had not died at Vincennes, when he was under forty years of age, what might not have happened?

The Flemings were the weavers of Europe. It is a considerable business to clothe the world, and the Flemings undertook the business with great success. That we learnt all our knowledge of weaving from the Flemings is certain, but we were the slowest of pupils. Even in the Middle Ages it was seen that a piece of cloth was worth at least eight times as much as the wool is from which it had been spun and woven, and that, if we could catch the art, the wool which bore an export duty of 100 per cent., with ease, i.e., without depreciation, would have borne in the shape of cloth, a far higher duty, and, in the absence of duty, a far higher profit. We had extraordinary advantages of climate, but we either did not

understand them, or made no use of them. As I have told you before, I do not detect any progress in the arts of invention, under which the process of production was cheapened, for centuries, except in two arts, paper and glass-making. I do not know whence these arts were derived, and how they were improved. But I am sure that they were both of foreign origin, and that their Revelopment in England was not due to native ability or to native enterprise.

Painting, I hope it may be said without offence, is the most mechanical of the fine arts. Were it not mechanical, I am sure that over three hundred men and women of genius could not be painting, with much acceptance, at once. It is the only one of the fine arts which procures the fortunate possessor the two great boons of fame and fortune-the fame perhaps evanescent, though not as evanescent as that of an author, the fortune perhaps permanent. Genius in medieval England was, I grant, very poorly paid. We do not know, except in rare cases, who were the builders of our great cathedrals, and for a very good reason, because they were generally working men, at slightly better wages than their fellows. Even as late as the seventeenth century, Dorothy Wadham paid a pound a week to her architect, who built fifty times better than his descendant in the craft, who gets fifty times more. Men used the skill of those people for building stately tombs, with decorative imagery. The monument of Cardinal Beaufort is a great work of art. I am sure that the effigy is a perfect likeness. I have often looked at it in Winchester Cathedral with much interest, not only as a noble specimen of fifteenth-century art, probably Flemish, but as the effigy of nearly the last great clerical statesman of the Middle Ages.

There are no English painters till the eighteenth century. There are no portraits of Englishmen till the sixteenth. Had they ever existed, they could not all have been totally lost. During the fifteenth century Flanders was teeming with art, and Italy had carried it to perfection. At last came Holbein and his school. Then there was a flying visit of Rubens, who painted the apotheosis of the first Duke of Bucks of the house of Villiers. I am glad that no Englishman was competent to perform the degrading function. Then comes Vandyke for a more lengthened period. After him

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there is Lely and his pupils, who drew portraits on speculation, in hopes that the sitters (I do not touch on their character) would buy. I have read through the list of portraits of this kind which he had on his hands at the time of his decease. They would furnish a Grosvenor Street gallery. Then comes Kneller. The eighteenth century, which is in England the great epoch of inventive activity, sees the beginnings of purely English art.

I have referred to this because it illustrates my position by a subject with which all Englishmen are now supposed to be familiar; occasionally, I fear, more familiar than informed. I know nothing which has pained me more, who have an honest pride of race, than to feel how great a debt in every department of art, science, philosophy, invention, we owe to foreign immigrants and foreign teachers. Even now, I fear, a Teutonic certificate of proficiency is worth more to men than any evidence of ability which they can procure from their fellow-countrymen. Even what we fondly hoped was our own is being demanded by other races. I have heard that Shakspere can be claimed for the Welsh race, Milton and Chaucer for the French; for the philologers, having settled the origins of language for the next six months, and given us a professor or reader for each epoch, divert themselves with the race derivation of our

names.

There is no doubt an intimate connection between art and utility, for art is an exponent of utility in its best sense, and the homeliest conveniences may be subordinated to art. Now the economist is on the look-out for the processes by which any invention has served utility, and he knows that art and utility equally study fitness, the best adaptation of means to ends. From my, perhaps vulgar, point of view, a straight drawn furrow in a fifty-acre field is as much a work of art as the curves which Xeuxis and Parrhasius drew, or Hogarth's line of Beauty is. Perhaps, horresco referens, it is nearly, if not quite, as difficult of perfect acquisition as the efforts of the artist are. The other efforts of a skilled husbandman are artistic, though they seem to be mechanical. A closed or open drain is to be made on or round agricultural land. The fall, we will say, is one foot in a hundred. It needs a very practised eye to so regulate the declivity of the ditch as to secure that the flow should be even, and no part be waterlogged. I could multiply illustrations from the