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from the south to the north. Nothing could have been more cleverly strategic that her plan, as I noticed ir several places when I traversed a considerable part of the country which she intended to occupy. Unfortunately for France, she had in Louis XV. a king who, while living the life of our Charles II., affected the policy of Louis XIV. The Seven Years' War really created the union of the American plantations, and gave them the means for the War of Independence.

Spain counted for nothing, and all Scandinavia for next to nothing. Germany was again torn to pieces by war; now by a dynastic struggle, as a century before by a religious war. Holland had been finally ruined by the house of Orange in the person of William V. The Italian States seemed past hope. England alone came out with the universal empire of a sole market. Captain Cook was discovering and annexing in the Pacific and Australia, and England had at last a chance of winning a greater empire of trade than the Bull of Borgia had given Portugal and Spain together. At that time, it would have cost but little to have annexed the Spanish colonies, and for the elder Pitt to have exclaimed, on behalf of the British Parliament, "Uterque Poenus serviat uni."

Now look at the opportunity for the manufacturers who had the chance of supplying a sole market. The seaboard of North America, from Nova Scotia to the borders of Florida was theirs. India was theirs, and without their permission no one could land cargo, or take cargo thence. The supply of this market so largely, so suddenly extended, was in the hands of English manufacturers and merchants, and the economy of production, i.e., of inventions in aid of or in substitution of human labour was the obvious and ready road to wealth. No wonder that the abilities of Arkwright, Crompton, and Watt, were called into active exercise. And though in a short time the reverse of the Treaty of Paris was at hand, and the acknowledgment of American independence was to cut off half, and that the most hopeful half, of the sole market, the English were equal to the occasion. They discovered that a sole market was, after all, by no means so absolute a good as they imagined, and they began to build up a new colonial empire, more vast than that which they had lost, under a new and far truer maxim, that trade follows the flag.

Besides, the temporary stimulus which the sole-market theory had afforded British invention was made permanent by the natural effort which producers who have embarked their capital in industrial avocations make to arrest the risk, even though it may prove an imaginary risk, of decline. Nations which have made no progress in the industrial arts are slow to move and apathetic. Nations which have made progress are exceedingly unwilling to lose ground. Again, the circumstances in which Europe was placed, effectually staved off competition. It seemed that the stars in their courses were fighting against the industrial rivals of this country.

A few short years, and the great continental war broke out. Every throne in Europe was shaken, even in countries which were not invaded. The French overran Europe from the harbour of Gibraltar to the city of Moscow. In the eighteen years continental war there was no leisure for the arts of peace, for the growth of industry. But England early gained the mastery at sea, only checked by the folly of the short war with the United States, and became the workshop of Europe. Napoleon, that idol of idiots, fancied that he could destroy the English factories by the Berlin and Milan decrees, and being a clever Italian of the fifteenthcentury type, that depicted by Machiavelli, denounced the penalties of piracy against all English vessels which entered continental ports with English merchandise. When he marched to Moscow in 1812, his soldiers were clothed with the produce of Yorkshire looms, i.e., he found that the exigencies of war, from one point of view, had to override the exigencies of war from another point of view.

The peace of Europe, from the Battle of Waterloo to the Crimean War, interrupted only by a few transient struggles, was the peace of languor. During this period the European nations were recovering from the losses which they had suffered for eighteen years of unbroken bloodshed and waste. The epoch was characterized by the capital invention of steam transit on railroads, the accomplishment of which was again due to English invention, and was suggested by the obvious advantage of cheapening freight, one of those economies in production on which I have already commented. It was English, because in England only, so

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great was the prostration of the Continent, was the accumulation of capital, and its expenditure on productive works of deferred profit, possible.

The wars which have followed have been brief, for the Crimean was the longest European war, the civil war in America the most prolonged. But though they have been generally brief, they have been exceedingly destructive. It is too early to determine or even to guess at the effect which they have induced on the resources of the states which have waged them. The utmost we can at present follow is the economical efforts which they have induced on industry and trade, especially on that of the United Kingdom. Now England was very little affected by the Crimean War, except in one direction. Up to the time in which hostilities began with Russia, the corn trade with that country was of great significance to the belligerents, so significant that when war was declared, Odessa was not blockaded till the corn fleet was dispatched; and nothing was left to blockade. But indirectly this war had, followed as it was by a still more significant struggle, a singular effect on values. It caused, and by a chain of circumstances assisted, that remarkable increase of agricultural rent (263 per cent. between 1854 and 1879) which has been a prime factor in the agricultural ruin of to-day. The Russian corn trade never recovered the collapse of the Crimean War, and it naturally took time to develop it elsewhere, and in the interval high grain prices prevailed, and stimulated an agricultural system which had been carried to perfection, except in one direction, the accurate keeping of farmers' accounts. I do not find that the Indian Mutiny, which followed the Crimean War, had much effect on English manufactures and trade. Had it happened at the present time, it would have had far different effects, for the wheat exports of India, which have unquestionably brought about that over-supply of which my first rule, given you last week, affords the interpretation, was at that time non-existent.

But the process was interrupted by the four years' civil war in America. No war was ever so costly and so destructive. The debt contracted by the North was enormous, the waste of life prodigious, the destruction of property incalculable, the arrest of development total When the war was over, the demand for European, especially for English products, was urgent, so urgent that it

easily overleaped the barrier of what was intended to be a prohibitive tariff, carried through the American Congress by Mr. Morrill, as the price, it may be feared, of that gentleman's allegiance, a tariff which rendered the restoration of waste exceedingly costly, and the redemption of the Federal Debt exceedingly easy. The waste replaced, there began the development of the North-west corn lands, and the exportation of their produce to the United Kingdom.

Then came short but sanguinary European wars. They were all wars for frontier, like the Crimean and American wars. There was the war undertaken by Prussia and Austria together, for the sake of pillaging Denmark, and completing the German frontier on the Baltic and the German Ocean. The quarrel over the spoils between the two brigands came briefly after, and the delimitation of Austria, which suffered a further delimitation in Northern Italy. These wars were short and costly, and what is to our purpose, arrested industrial rivalry. Lastly came the Franco-German War, the latest, perhaps the last, struggle after the success of the policy of Henry IV. and Richelieu. It is difficult to say whether the payment of the indemnity was a greater loss to France than its receipt was to Germany. Why I may be perhaps hereafter able to explain.

Since then there has been generally peace; but such a peace! An armed peace, if prolonged, is more destructive of economical prosperity than open warfare for a time. I do not see that the industrial position of England is threatened. The German and Belgian are to some extent inventive, the former especially in chemistry and its products. But they are much more disposed to imitation. Friends of mine have been obliged to treat persistently intrusive Teutons, who desire to pirate their processes, to the millpond of dye-works, from which the unwilling bather issues an altered man. But the victories of piracy are limited. At present all nations but our own effectually block the impulse to invention by protective duties, for the earliest and most persistent effect of protection is to disable the nation which adopts it from the just interpretation of its own faculties.

THE GUILD AND APPRENTICE SYSTEM.

The organization of parish or manor-Of towns-The guilds of London and elsewhere-Apprenticeships, criticized by Adam Smith -Motives for the system—The wages of artisans—The property of the guilds-Combinations of workmen hardly taken into the scheme of economists-Economical fallacies generally contain some truthMr. Mill's wage fund-Associations of capital or of labour-The trade union a partnership—The emancipation of trade unions— The trade union a remedy against socialism.

ORGANIZATION was the essence of early English life. In the country every man belonged to a parish or manor, and, to use a modern phrase, had a stake in it. The landless man was an outlaw, a thief, a brigand. He lurked on the no-man's land, on the border of the settlement, in the outlying woods. He may not have been a very unpopular person, when he plundered Jew or Lombard, or even an abbot, particularly if he were one of those foreigners whom the Pope planted in an English benefice, or who got the reward of service under the king, or was the object of royal favour. But the landless man was otherwise included in no organized or regulated parish or manor, he was outside the universal system of English life, not in the Middle Ages only, but long afterwards. The English peasant for many a long day, even up to recent times, looked askance at a stranger or foreigner, as they sometimes called him, when he was imported into the parish. The law of parochial settlement, selfish as its motive was, and mischievous as its results were, was, in principle, an appeal to ancient and deep-seated traditions.