idea of humanity-that which regards its physical wants as the most important. Though it were to succeed (which I do not believe it could) in obviating destitution and abolishing social suffering, the boon would be purchased at a price which no true man would consent to pay-at no less an expense than the destruction of everything deserving the name of virtue, by precluding all opportunity of it. The best economical condition of a community for every high moral end, as I conceive, would be that which allowed to every man scope and power, by the exercise of provident habits and self-control, to emancipate himself eventually from the direction of others, and become the arbiter and master of the application of his faculties and bodily powers. The structure of society fails of its highest ideal, in proportion as it precludes men who have competence for such self-direction from ever achieving it. But communism would render this to all for ever impossible; under it no man could become his own master. By no amount of exertion could he achieve this independence, the aspiration after which is so natural, and, I am inclined to think, so ennobling a sentiment, in the breast of every true man. Whatever, then, might be the economical fruits of communism, and taking human nature as we find it, and subjecting it to such a regimen, I dare not rate these high; whatever I say might be its economical fruits, it would be a great step in moral retrogression. It would reduce society much nearer to a piece of mechanism than a body moved and held together by the free play of affections and voluntary powers.

I would not, however, be understood as implying any very severe censure of such small co-operative

societies as the "Working-Tailors' Association," the "Needlewomen's Association," and similar clubs, so zealously promoted and advocated by the author of "Alton Locke" and Professor Maurice. A few individuals may combine and apply their labour, as a few individuals may combine and apply their capital. It were a very different matter so to combine and arrange the labour of a nation. Our tremendous social evils have led these and other benevolent men to advocate such schemes, but experience must, I am persuaded, soon convince all unbiassed observers that we will have to look in other directions for an effective and generally applicable cure.

But though communism be proved incompetent to secure the objects at which it aims, it will not follow that the distribution of property, which has been promoted and fenced by our social usages and public laws, is conformable to justice, or consistent with the social weal. Communism may be one extreme; for long ages we have aimed, and but too successfully, at establishing another.

For ages we, in Britain, have aimed at the accumulation and perpetuation of vast masses of wealth in the hands of individuals. We have done so mainly in two ways-by laws and usages affecting the production and distribution of money, and by laws and usages affecting the tenure and occupancy of land. On the inquiries which would be raised by an elucidation of the first of these facts, it is impossible for me this evening to enter. Great part of a lecture I delivered last July to a neighbouring Class, was occupied with these inquiries; to resume them here, though it might be important to my general object, would be unendurable by your patience. In these circumstances I must

content myself with merely remarking, that in specifying our laws and usages affecting the production and distribution of money as promoters and fences of accumulations of wealth, I refer to our banking system, to paper money, and to the prevalence of credit in business transactions; the quintessence of the whole of what I have in view may be compendiously expressed the making a promise to pay perform for a time the function of real payment.

The credit system may be viewed as so far an instrument for the distribution of wealth, and no doubt it acts as such amongst those who can obtain credit; but the poorest class, and that a very large one, cannot obtain credit, or can do so only to such a limited amount, and at such exorbitant rates of interest, as must keep them ever poor. Mr. Mayhew states that the ordinary rate of interest in the London costermongers' money market (those who sell fruit, fish, and vegetables in the streets, and who number with their families, in the metropolis alone, upwards of thirty thousand), the rate at which money is lent to the London costermongers is the incredible one of 20 per cent. per week, or 1,0407. a year for every 1007. advanced; whilst the extensive merchant can double his business, and the large manufacturer treble his productive power by means of accommodation afforded him at the rate of 4 per cent. per annum. Trading or producing mainly on credit, whilst it may safely be pronounced to be ultimately the ruin of those who resort to it, yet enables many a longheaded and not over-scrupulous man to push speculations to a successful issue on which he could not else have embarked, and to accumulate wealth which his own unaided industry and skill would never have

F

reached a tithe of. But from the credit system the industrious poor suffer heavily in many ways; it places them on unequal terms, factitiously unequal in the race of life; through the frequent failures it induces, it makes them pay a higher price than they should do for every necessary of life, and in towns the extreme usury to which their purveyors are subjected is ultimately a heavy tax upon them. The London costermongers pay for the hire of barrows alone upwards of sixteen thousand pounds a year, all which and much more is added to the price of the food of the very poor in the metropolis.

With these very elementary illustrations, I must, for the present, content myself, and hasten on to inquire a little into the influence of our laws and usages affecting the tenure and the occupancy of land.

One of the great questions of the age-I would say the greatest question in social economy-which is on the eve of rising for discussion and settlement, is the land question. The state of Ireland-the state of our own highlands, has already demanded attention to it, and with a voice which shams and make-believes will not long put by. We have arrived at a period when this question must rise in the course of social evolution. We have passed through an era in which the primary concern has been WEALTH-but we are entering on an era in which the primary concern will be MAN. Hitherto the privileged, the successful, the dominant classes, have recked little how man fared so wealth could be produced, accumulated, and enjoyed. Man without adventitious distinctions-man merely as man, has been valued only as he could be made the instrument of producing wealth, but a new era is dawning, in which wealth will be valued only as it can be made to be the

instrument of the good of man-man as man—not to the good of the few, but of the many. The burden of the seer-spirits of the age is, " Man above property." The objects of the two great sections of the dominant and successful class-pleasure the object of the possessors of wealth, and gain the object of the pursuers of wealth -have both been weighed in the social balance, and alike been found wanting. Honourable exceptions there have been amongst both classes, but speaking generally, for ages the possessors of wealth have been devoted to pleasure as their object, and the pursuers of wealth to gain as their object, whatever might be the social results of either pursuit. Of the successful classes, most true has thus been the saying of the poet

"Pleasure and gain, two gods divide them all."

The leaders in the pursuit of pleasure, as the hereditary possessors of wealth, independent of all labour or useful exertion, are the territorial owners of land. As a class, the landowners have retained more than all the ancient privileges of such ownership, with a great enhancement of the original advantages, whilst the greater portion of its responsibilities and duties have been allowed to lapse, or have become merely optional. In the feudal era the head of a clan was not, in the same sense, the exclusive proprietor of territory, as the present landlord. His retainers had a claim in honour, if not in right, to be sustained on the land, or sustained by forays under his leadership and direction. His was no idle honour-no sinecure enjoyment. He was in a sense both purveyor for, and governor of, his tribe. And as the petty feudalities became merged in a central monarchy, those favourites to whom the Richards and