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LIGHT AND SHADE.

CELEBRATING THE JUBILEE.

[A scare has set in among the poorest citizens of Calcutta. Some ill-disposed person has circulated the rumour that the Sirkar requires a large number of human heads for the Jubilee celebration, and there is dismay in consequence among the low caste people, whose heads would be naturally the cheapest.]

If we could slightly gratify
Our loved Victoria (R. and I.),
And make her Jubilee complete
By hanging heads about the street,
Who so disloyal as to dread
Losing his cheap and common head?
Heads? Far dearer things than they
Are lost and stolen every day-
Honour and self-respect are sold
To keep the Jubilee of Gold!

Yes, every day of every year
We see worse deeds in England here;
Our workers' death-in-life-the hard
Fierce struggle for such pinched reward;
The breaking hearts, the ruined lives
Of fathers, mothers, sisters, wives;
The starving children-blighted flowers,
Shut from warm sun and summer hours;
The eternal toil that may not have
Or rest or end, save in the grave.
These sacrifices ever are
Thrown under wealth's triumphant car ;
These celebrate perpetually
Mammon's eternal Jubilee.

A Jubilee! The word might well
Choke us, who see the living hell

In which some men are doomed to spend
Their dreary lives till dreary end,
A Jubilee ! Ah, if but we

Dared more than dream of what might be--
A holy, perfect Jubilee !

Would but each man, clean-souled, clear-eyed,
Vow to be never satisfied

Till Wrong was dead, Oppression slain,
And brotherhood awake again;

If every man and woman swore
Never to rob a brother more,
To live no more an idle life,

But share the burden and the strife,
And let man's highest aim be still
Triumph of good-defeat of ill.
Not the mean longing to "succeed,”
Regardless of a brother's need,
But man's true duty to fulfil—
That were a Jubilee indeed.

THEY who arrange our wars are those
Who couldn't, wouldn't face our foes,
But sit in Courts secure.
Of what should Britons be afraid
If they a Battenberg can aid,
And Queenly smiles secure?

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The New World shook him off: the old yet groans
Beneath what he and his prepared, if not
Completed he leaves heirs on many thrones
To all his vices, without what begot
Compassion for him-his tame virtues ; drones
Who sleep, or despots who have now forgot
A lesson which shall be retaught them, wake
Upon the thrones of earth; but let them quake!
OH! Mrs. Fry! Why go to Newgate? Why
Preach to poor rogues? And wherefore not
begin

With Carlton, or with other houses? Try
Your hand at hardened and imperial sin.
To mend the people's an absurdity,

A jargon, a mere philosophic din,
Unless you make their betters better: Fy!
I thought you had more religion, Mrs. Fry.
-Byron.

THE Rev. J. W. Black, of Lancells Vicarage, Stratton, Cornwall, is apprehensive that the tithe agitation will have the effect of putting money into the pockets of the landlords." To prevent this we must spread the light, and show that no one has a right to income from the land which he does not earn. The time will come, and probably is not far distant, when neither priest or landlord" will tythe or toll in our dominions."

A GOOD SUGGESTION.-A Lancashire member of the English Land Restoration League writes to the secretary:- I enclose my subscription (2s. 6d.) for 1887-8, and also a further sum of 9s., which is half of the profits accruing from sales of DEMOCRAT since October last. The other half has gone to augment the funds of the Tong Liberal and Radical Association, among whose members I mostly dispose of the periodical. There may be among your members many, like myself, of limited means, and whose subscriptions are necessarily small, who would be willing to adopt this means of increasing them."

BOOKS FOR THE PEOPLE. SOMETHING More is needed for the education of the people than the cheap newspaper-there is as great or even greater need of the cheap book. This, publishers are at length supplying. It is now possible for the working man, by the expenditure of a very small sum monthly, to get at last a library of books each of which is in itself a treasure.

In the honourable task of providing the people with that food which cannot perish, we must give high place to Walter Scott, 24 Paternoster-row.

The Comelat Classics are a series of books issued by this publisher, each of them a stout book of near two hundred pages, elegantly bound and beautifully printed, containing some of the noblest thoughts given to the world and costing only one shilling each.

The latest of these is the "Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," a book that has through the long centuries been wisdom to the wise. Marcus Aurelius is the one king who was greater than his office and lived above and beyond it. He proscribed, it is true, Christianity, but in his days, as now, Christians had little in common with Christ, and he only sought to suppress the haughty aspirations of a church for worldly dominion. A man who spends a shilling in this book, reads all that is in it and absorbs it into his life, and from it models all his doings, will be one of the best and greatest not only of this age but of all ages.

From the same publisher we have the last volume of the "Canterbury Poets." Of these all can be said that has been already said of the Comelat Classics. The price also is a shilling. This month the volume issued is a selection of the best English translations of Heine. Those who love the sweetest melancholy set to the loveliest music must love Heine. He is a poet's poet. His song is the sweetest that man ever sung. And here in this little volume we have the best and the sweetest of him exquisitely rendered in musical English.

Letters are the mirror of history, and those know the life and progress of a nation best who are best acquainted with its literature. But to know what has been written, to enter into its subtlest essence, we must know the writers. Thus in publishing in a cheap form their " English Men of Letters," Messrs. Macmillan and Co. are doing a national service. They are providing a shilling university. We can well understand with what joy the vast growing crowd of those who have a love of knowledge will month by month spend their shilling and get an acquaintance with the men who have built up our nobly monumental literature.

A complete life of Goldsmith, by William Black; of Johnston, by Leslie Stephen; of Scott, by R. H. Hutton; of Gibbon, by j. C. Morison; of Hume, by Professor Huxley; each interesting, each complete, and each one shilling. As in the Comelat Classics, we again wonder at the advance of the age.

We are glad to see John Morley's late address on the "Study of Literature" republished by the Messrs. Macmillan in a neat and cheap form. For those to whom the paradise of literature is unknown and unopen, this address is a trumpet

call to new and strange delights, while those who are familiar with literature will hail it as a contribution to literature.

Professor Seeley has done more than any other living man to bring vividly before the public the growth and the potentiality of Greater Britain. We therefore welcome "Our Colonial Expansion," being a popular abbreviation from the " Expansion of England" as a valuable means of bringing the matter before those who cannot afford high-priced books. But we would have valued it more had Messrs. Macmillan made the work sixpence instead of a shilling.

THE HEALTH OF NATIONS, a review of the life and works of Edwin Chadwick, C.B. (Longman & Co.) This is a record of successful work of the highest value and interest to all practical reformers.

SALISBURYISM AND COERCION V. PARNELLISM AND CRIME, by Junius Secundus (The Gladstonian Hibernian Union, 7 Princes-buildings, Clifton). This is a brief record of Ireland's wrongs, well adapted for circulation at the present time.

THE A B C OF A PLAN TO OBTAIN THE RIGHTS OF THE MAN, by E. W. Gracchus, jun., Cheltenham, Windridge. The plan is to buy up the land at twenty-five years' purchase on the average of the last seven years' rent, and pay for it in Exchequer notes, one thirtieth part to be withdrawn from circulation and destroyed every year. The notes to be legal tender in payment of rent to the State.

THE WRONGS OF MAN, THEIR ORIGIN AND REMEDY. Two lectures by Thomas Garbutt, of Attercliffe. It is seldom that the advocates of Socialism state their plans, and the wisdom of reticence is shown by the dangers which arise when details are described. Mr. Garbutt has not hesitated to explain his system. He proposes to create a circulating medium of two thousand millions sterling, buy up the interest of existing capitalists in everything, and repay the capitalists nine hundred millions a year for fifty years.

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A CORRESPONDENT who contends against the Disestablishment of the Church, and maintains the claims of the landlords, argues that "the State has the power to break up everything in whatever way it has grown into existence." The power of the State is necessarily supreme and unlimited, but we contend that this power should be exercised in accordance with wisdom and justice. Surely the way in which a thing has grown into existence would be an important consideration in reference to its future treatment. If a man makes a picture or builds a house, the fact that these have grown into existence by the exercise of his industry would have to be taken into account. When manna in the wilderness grew into existence by falling from the clouds or rising as dew, the method by which it grew into existence would be taken into account, and if a Duke of Westminster demanded rent for hundreds of acres of manna, his right should be questioned, even if it had been exercised for centuries. Governments confiscate the rights of the people whenever they allow private persons to charge rent for land. They have not only the power to stop this confiscation, but wisdom and justice demand that they should do so.

CORRESPONDENCE.

To the Editor of THE DEMOCRAT. SIR,-I have lately returned to England after thirty-five years' absence. Six of those were spent in Adelaide, South Australia; six in Nelson, the northern town of the southern island of New Zealand; and the last twenty-three on the sea border of the vast Canterbury Plains, which occupy the middle eastern part of the south island. You have asked "What are your comparative impressions of England and the Colonies?

There is a great charm about your unrivalled combinations of art and nature, &c., &c., but the squeeze, the fret, the rub of your social state, the galling poverty of your labourers, and the bitterness of your east-wind winters is detestable.

Let us take hold of a few facts. The north and south islands of New Zealand are about equal in size to England, Scotland, and Ireland-our population is only 580,000; therefore our proportion of land to people is 114 acres to each man, woman, and child—you have about two acres for each.

Against our advantage in land, we have in New Zealand a national debt averaging £100 per individual, the national debt of England averages but £22. And instead of nearly a free port, as you have here, we have cruel custom duties. Happily we have no tithes. All churches, of whatever denomination, are supported by voluntary contributions, and right marvellously our people do contribute.

Drapery is much cheaper here than in New Zealand. We have plenty of wool and plenty of woollen manufactories, but the latter can scarcely keep along for want of cheaper labour and more buyers. However, we have great comfort in knowing that when we buy our Colonial fabrics they are all wool. We have not yet imported cotton wherewith to mix and spoil the articles we wear.

No clothing is so suitable as woollen for our changeable climate, but of course our maid-servants, with their £30 per year, want something more fashionable.

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The last accounts say that we are to have an extra tax of id. in the pound on all property exceeding in value £2,500. How came we to get so deeply in debt?" Whilst our rulers were flattering our pride, their hands were in our pockets. Sir Julius Vogel has been our William Pitt. But although our people have been robbed right and left by our Governments, they are nothing like so miserable as yours. Take one instance of the state of things amongst labourers in Merry! England. A man who had worked remarkably faithfully for one family for fifty-seven long years was allowed to drag out the remaining nine of his existence upon is. per week and one loaf of bread from the parish. Oh, England, for shame! "Why didn't the fellow put by something for his old age? says Britain. How could he? Although his value to his employers must have been fully £1 per week, he only received 8s. or gs. "The family" were very wealthy-the man who earned so much for them was allowed to pine in dearth. Miserable offenders are your selfish farmers and landlords! "Do labourers in New Zealand do better?" should hope so! With scarcely an exception, all the men who worked on my farm at Tai Tapu for even two or three years, went off to land of their own. A gentleman, lately arrived from England, was standing by my side as a very

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respectable-looking couple drove their own nice horse and four-wheel to our church door. "You see that?" I said. "Yes." "Fourteen years ago that man was a labourer on my farm." Never!' he exclaimed. He left me to go on land bought with his wages. Sent home for his father, mother, three brothers and one sister. They all worked together for a few years; now the brother and sister are by themselves, and as well off as I am." Just contrast this account with what follows. A few days ago a very intelligent Wiltshire woman was giving me an epitome of her history-telling me how she and her husband had worked early and late-how each one of her children had to do their work before and after school-how she had tended all the young stock ever since she had a home of her own, &c., &c. "And how much land have you?" I said. "Eighty-five acres." "Your own, of course?' My own! no fear!" Now, what prospect is there for that truly deserving family? They must just drag their lives out to make up their rent, and when they cannot work they will have nothing to call their own. Verily, in Britain," the destruction of the poor is their poverty," but one good dinner given to them in the year, and one flannel petticoat, are supposed to atone for all oppressions.

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But what disgusts me most in England is to hear the way in which the labourers' families are spoken of. "Poor as poor can be, and ten children, of course!" is said with such a tone and look of disgust. Who is it that multiplieth them greatly? Him to whom the landlords bow on Sundays, but in their ways they deny Him all the rest of the week. Things must be greatly altered since the times of that heaven-taught king, Solomon :-"He could rejoicingly say, in the multitude people is the King's glory." Verily the poor are now separated from their friends. If one ventures to make any comment on their poverty, one is told with a sneer, "They find money to go to the publichouse!" But are their landlords abstainers? And when their labourers are toiling in their fields, do they not teach them to drink intoxicants by providing them with no other drinks? Much food is in the tillage of the poor, but the unjust eat it, and, not content with this, they destroy it to gratify their own craving for strong drink.

The time shall come when riches gathered, but not by right, shall run through the holes in their bags, and when he that gathereth by labour shall keep the increase.

As a rule the earnings of our small farmers are "not treasured, nor laid up; our merchandise is for those who dwell in our families, to eat sufficiently and for durable clothing;" but, Mr. Editor, if I could just bring before you one of these households of thirteen children, if you could see the stalwart elder laddies, with their blooming sisters, and all sizes down to the treasured little tot, most consequence of all, the sight would do inore than anything else to convince you of the truth of my statements. Many came to our land twenty or thirty years ago, bought sections which turned out lucky, and in a few years they woke up and found themselves rich-some of these went on getting "their pockets full, without a counterbalance in the skull." One generally hears a man of this class spoken of as "Old Brooks" or "Old Piper," and their families seldom turn out well, whereas men who bought a little rural land, carefully cultivated it, and paid at the same time great

attention to the education of themselves and their children, are universally respected.

Near to my farm in Tai Tapu are four families, numbering 15, 13, 12, and 10 respectively. They all live prosperously upon their small farms. There's not a busier family in the country than ours-from daylight to dark we are at work," is their story. No trouble about what can be found for their stalwart lads and blooming lasses to do. Times very bad," as "Will Carlton " says, "all round the world just now;" but in New Zealand we can afford to wait a wee, with no landlords to dun us out of our own holdings. All we can get is our own. Yours truly,

66

AN OLD COLONIST.

UNITY!

To the Editor of THE DEMOCRAT. SIR,-The axiom "that truth is many sided "' is readily accepted by most thoughtful men in theory, yet only too rarely made the basis of practical action. This infirmity of the honest human mind has been painfully shown in the conduct of the movement to emancipate our native land from the tyranny of landlordism. The grandeur of land nationalisation is that it offers a truly scientific answer to those sad thinkers who say with William Morris

"Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, What can I do to make the crooked straight?"

In a word, release the land from the control of a clique and the hideous deformities of our national life are in a fair way to be straightened.

Yet how?

Alas! this is where the leaders of the blind themselves stumble. Some look too far ahead, others are narrowly practical. And the suffering multitude are the victims of these differences of opinion. Yet differences must exist for our subject is so very large.

But consider. We land emancipators want to give equality of opportunity to all. Only base men can be against us in this desire. But many more or less good men cannot, at present, see how equality of opportunity is to be secured through land nationalisation. How can we teach the latter while ourselves indulging in domestic strife about method?

By all means let those who see differently in respect to our common aim enforce their views. Truth is the result of conflict of opinion. But if the differences of opinion relate only to method, surely we ought not to weaken our cause by ventilating in a spirit of antagonism our opinions about this.

"The land for the people!" This is our aim. Let the cry be thundered forth throughout the nation. Meanwhile, a conference of earnest land nationalisers is, I feel, a serious necessity, in order that the essential elements of our creed may be clearly and unitedly placed before the people. But so many-sided is our great subject that I would most earnestly deprecate any attempt at outward union on these questions of method. Unity of spirit in the bonds of peace ought, however, surely to be made evident to those who are yet ignorant of the vital truth about the land.Faithfully yours,

57 Charing Cross, S.W.

WILLIAM JAMESON.

BARON BRAMWELL.

To the Editor of THE DEMOcrat. SIR, Mr. Henry Dunning Macleod, of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, has been telling the readers of the Times, what the DEMOCRAT's readers know very well, viz. :-the constitutional truth that there is no private property in land in England, and that a man can have only an estate or special personal interest of some kind in it, so long as he behaves himself properly, quamdiu se bene gesserit, or, so long as the king pleased, quamdiu regi placuerit, in law Latin. Therefore, indisputably this estate was terminable immediately the landholder made himself obnoxious to the king and commonweal, and very clearly Colonel O'Cal laghan's tenure should be forfeited for misconduct.

Our tenants are entrusted with land for the public good, not to enable them to prey on the public. A crossing-sweeper has as much right to mount the horse entrusted to him to hold, and ride off and sell it, as a Parliament composed of landlords has to assume private ownership of the soil; both would abuse trust, and be equally criminal.

But uprises Baron Bramwell, in all the pompous importance of grizzled horsehair and flowing robes, to justify the robbery according to LAW, and to chide Mr. Macleod for advancing "pernicious doctrines," because, forsooth, on his simple authority, landholders are de facto "absolute owners of the soil of England! If so, as one of your correspondents remarked, they could sell England to the Emperor of Russia. The idea is preposterous.

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Mr. Macleod has no firm grasp of his subject yet, and can only confute the baron by referring him to Blackstone and other old law writers. It would benefit both controvertists to read the DEMOCRAT Occasionally, they would be astonished to find how accurately plain working men could instruct them.

True, Blackstone and Co. were once the only authorities accessible to the tyro, but whence did their knowledge come? Why from the ancient rolls which studious toilers can now read for themselves and smile at the Bramwell's arrogant conceit. I maintain that the baron's doctrine is "pernicious," inasmuch as it encourages the brutal selfishness of the O'Callaghan gens. The quicker landholders are taught their real position the better for them, and their teachers would prove their best friends, for I heard a plain man who could boast little academic learning, though possessed of robust common sense, discuss the question thus:"Granting, for argument's sake that Bramwell is right in saying that the peer is absolute owner of the soil, he must have become so by dispossessing the people, then on the same principle the people can in their turn similarly disposses the peer."

Baron Bramwell forgets that laws are mutable, that they can be repealed as well as made, and that Parliament, as De Lolme puts it in a foot note, can do anything short of turning a man into a woman or a woman into a man. Therefore it depends entirely on the electors how soon they shall begin to work a metamorphosis on the privileged classes. The right to divest them being in the public interest and just, is therefore stronger than the right to invest them, which was selfish and unjust. LEX.

To abolish Poverty we want the Earth.-Dr. McGlynn.

A WORKMAN'S SECRET.

CONCLUSION.

WHAT Mr. Firebrace said to his daughter when he discovered that it was by her means Makinnon had been warned of the attempt that was to be made to get his secret, no one ever knew. He was a hard man, but he loved his daughter. Yet he used to her words that she could never remember without turning pale.

The friendship so strangely begun between Helen Firebrace and Kate Makinnon continued to grow apace. Each felt the need of the other. To Helen the gentleness of her friend's life and its sweetness were a revelation of a world of which before she had hardly dreamed.

But as the days went on temptation in a new form beset Makinnon. He grew more and more in love with Helen. How could he win her? There was one way. Let him sell his invention to the world, and he would gain such riches and glory as would make him the equal of any woman. The Rev. Mr. Robertson once said to him,Look here, Makinnon, you are as far from yourself as chalk is from cheese."

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"Am I?"

You know you are."

"What then?

"You know the cause?"

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Aye, but to know the cause is not to know the cure."

"You love Miss Firebrace?"

"I love her as man never loved woman." "Now do you still think that to give your invention to the world is a wrong thing."

"I never said that I thought it wrong. I said that I for one would not dare to cause so much suffering to the world and throw so many workmen out of employment."

"I think that you are wrong."

"It may be."'

"At any rate I sympathise with you, for you will not do what you even doubt to be a wrong to gain this girl."

And so the days went on.

Miss Firebrace.

Sometimes he met

To him and indeed to others the old haughtiness of her demeanour was gone. She said to Kate

"I no longer feel that I am at war with the world."

And did you ever feel that?"

I did, my dear. I used to look upon all men, and especially all women, as utterly selfish." "Indeed, they are not."

Many are.

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"But many are not all."

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· All men are not like your brother."

"No, indeed; but still I know of other men who are very good."

"I think that I, too, see goodness everywhere." More than two years went by. Makinnon worked hard to drown his passion. Night and day he sat before his models, or walked with downcast head, planning some new invention. His sister still lived with him. She, too, had had her temptation. Mr. Robertson had asked her to be his wife.

"I cannot," she said; "at least, not now."
"And why?'

"Arthur, she said, "I cannot leave my brother."

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No, it is not that. Robert has too much to do and too many things on which to think for him merely to be overcome by the disease of loneliness, but unless he had a woman's care about him, I fear that dreaminess will sit upon him, and that his life will be more and more lived apart from the actual world."

And so she stayed with him and watched and waited.

Suddenly Glasgow was stirred to its depths. Norman Firebrace was dead. As the leading newspaper put it, "A well-known form has disappeared and will be equally missed at church and market. To the former he gave liberally, in the latter, if we can call the stock exchange and the building yard a market, he made a fortune large even in these days of large fortunes." In conclusion the article said, Mr. Firebrace's fortune is left entirely to his daughter, who will now be one of the richest women living in this or in any other country."

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When Makinnon read this the last gleam of hope seemed to die within him.

"One of the richest women living!" he groaned.

He had nourished, as men do, a hope, unconfessed even to himself. The last shadow of it was now gone.

At this time he fell ill. Hopelessness is a great cause of sickness. Kate, as she sat watching by his side, thought of a plan. She bent over him and seeing that he was asleep went for the nurse and putting on her bonnet hurried out to the house where we have entered before to meet Mr. Firebrace and his daughter.

Helen was at home sitting pale and calm and sad. She rose eagerly to receive her friend. "How is your brother?

"He is not better or worse."

Helen grew very pale as she said: "He will not die?"

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