ficially, has been much abated by the dismal accounts of the failure of individuals and the sufferings of large associated bodies.

It has been amongst the most fatal effects of the political agitation of the times that the legislature has not given that attention to the subject which the urgency of the case requires. Committees have met and inquired! True. A new poor law has been enacted! True again. But both these things have diverted the consideration from the one simple point-the one, the only thing necessary-employment, which ought to have directed, and must soon have driven, the mind to the first postulate-an increased area. Indeed, upon this hangs the whole recommendation of emigration; for what is demanded for the exile? landspace. For this he braves the solitude of the wilderness-for this he is willing to face the dangers of climate-the fatigues of incessant labourthe separation from social life. It is of the deepest importance to bear this in mind; for it takes us to the very root and foundation of all the benefits of social institution. Give me but land, says the exile, and from that single element my labour shall create all the rest! And has not the God of nature declared the same great truth?

We need not repeat at any length what has been bandied about till the fatigue of listening to the same thing disgusts us even with facts so momentous-namely, that we have land; that we have more--we have accumulated capital; and that we suffer that land to lie useless, and waste that capital in keeping men in idleness, thus training them on to crimes more expensive to the nation than the pauperism which engenders them. All these things are as notorious as they are disgraceful to a nation and government not having now to learn that the union of the three elements-soil, capital, and labour-is the source of wealth, and, as far as wealth is concerned, of national prosperity.

But, says political science, governments ought never to interfere in such cases: self-interest will always induce individuals to combine these elements, where they can be so combined with profit; and out of individual profit rises the prosperity of the whole. Very well; we do not gainsay the maxim; but we may ask how it happens that, in our advanced stage of social progression, this interest avails not? Have we reached the point when the combination of soil, capital, and labour ceases to be profitable-when the great axiom of the production of wealth no longer holds? It has been well observed that "the new circumstance of society is, that population increases too fast for the interest of the individual to keep pace with, and absorb, its accumulating industry." Let us endeavour to discover the reasons; this, perhaps, may be done negatively as well as positively.

It is not the want of capital. Upon this head we spoke in our former article: besides the fact there noticed, that, were a want of capital the cause, the rich farmer would give full employment; whereas it is ascertained that if the land be under-tilled, the proportion of labour employed by the wealthy very little exceeds the proportion employed by the poorer tenantry. Still more irresistible confirmation may be drawn from the low interest of money. Could agriculture be made more profitable to any, the smallest, extent by mere outlay for labour, not only would capital, agreeably to the laws of political science, immediately flow towards it, but especially in the late and existing state of the moneymarket. Touching this point a singular delusion prevails. It has been

asserted, and is imagined, that the country bankers have withheld accommodation from "solvent industry," as it has been termed, upon Heaven knows what absurd grounds connected with the system of banking whereas the truth is, that advances have been withheld, simply because the banker is aware that the trade of agriculture is not certainly profitable. The advocates for a paper currency can never overleap the fact, that any quantity of money may be obtained even for a speculation which bears a face of promise, and which is conducted by men of character. It is probable that the entire loan-capital of the country, which fluctuates from man to man, according as this or that operation of commerce creates a demand for it, does not now realize more than from three to four per cent.* at the very utmost. That an addition to the note-circulation of the private banker would make loans more easy, is true; but that a loan would be more accessible to persons engaged in a trade which the banker knows to be hazardous, is amongst the most vague notions ever entertained by ignorance. The true reason for the ready advances made in the high and palmy times of agriculture was its prosperity; the true reason of the contracting those advances is its adversity.

It is not the want of labour, or of the desire to labour; for in all branches competition is redundant, and has brought down labour below the cost of the subsistence of the labourer; while the deficiency is made up from other sources-rates, alms, and plunder.

It resides, then, it is we think demonstrated, in want of space-in that proportionate enlargement of the field of employment-land, upon which all the subsequent processes of production and of barter depend. We explained this in our essay of March, 1832. "It is," we must repeat, "it is because we decree that millions shall be kept in idleness; it is because we thus limit them to the consumption of the lowest possible quantity of food and raiment that will keep life and soul together; it is because we thus obstinately stop at its very beginnings the spring of production, and the universal vivifying current of circulation, that all classes languish."

What constitutes the difference between America and England ?— what confers so much of comfort upon the inhabitants of the former country beyond what the industrious classes enjoy in the latter? Neither more nor less than the single simple fact, that land may be had in America for little or nothing. And has England, then, no land ?-is her area fully peopled? The astounding answer is-" England possesses, at this minute, fifteen millions of uncultivated, but cultivable, acres; millions of capital, for which it is difficult to find employment at the low rate of three per cent. per annum; a redundancy of industrious, hardy, willing, and skilful people, driven to privation and crime by want of employment, (whilst the nation bitterly complains of the burdens.

People are very apt to talk of unemployed capital. There can be no such thing, unless we can suppose that persons lock up large sums of gold, which is not only incredible, but never done, except at banks, to be ready for any demand. If a man take up a mortgage, or buy into the funds, or lend on security of any sort, he only furnishes so much capital to some one who engages it in traffic of some kind or other. Even the daily currency-the small change of the country-is employed capital. If, as Colquhoun states, the wealth of the country amounts to 2,736,640,000, the unemployed part of it does not amount to half the comparatively trifling fractional part of thirty-six millions.

and the competition thus brought upon them ;) together with a perfect knowledge of the fact that wealth, individual and national, results from the combination of soil, capital, and labour.

But, say these same economists, "we must do nothing that may at any period, however remote, increase an evil. There may-nay, there must-come a time when all the land in England will be over-peopled, if, by making the industrious man comfortable-if, by removing the pressure of numbers against subsistence, we diminish privation, misery, and death, the great preventive checks' to increasing population." Such is the nonsense of over-cautious, over-calculating science. Millions are in a state of positive wretchedness-the whole community is borne down with the burden of their maintenance and their competition -life, property, and our social existence itself are in hourly danger ;but all this must be endured, lest the State should incur the same peril some centuries hence, and that, too, under the impossible supposition that knowledge, experiment, and experience will effect nothing for the better arrangement of social relations, and the disposition of that power of production, which we already know to be more than equal to the wants and luxuries of all, by the labours of comparatively few. O curas hominum! O quantum est in rebus inane!

I SAW a horrid thing of many names

And many shapes: some call'd it wealth, some power,
Some grandeur. From its heart it shot black flames
That scorch'd the souls of millions hour by hour,
And its proud eyes rain'd everywhere a shower

Of hopeless life and helpless misery;

For, spous'd to fraud, destruction was its dower!
But its cold brightness could not hide from me
The parent base of crime, the nurse of poverty!

All-unmatch'd Shakspeare, and the blind old man'
Of London, hymn in every land and clime ́
Our country's praise; while many an artisan
Spins for her glory school-taught lays sublime.
Them in her bosom, be they blank or rhyme,
Oblivious spirits gently will inter;

But three unborrow'd strains will to all time
Give honour, glory, highest laud to her-

"Thalaba!" "Peter Bell!""The Ancient Mariner!"

Even here, on earth, not altogether fade

The good and vile. Men, in their words and deeds,

Live, when the hand and heart in earth are laid;

For thoughts are things, and written thoughts are seeds -

Our very dust buds forth in flowers or weeds.

Then let me write for immortality

One honest song, uncramp'd by forms or creeds;
That men unborn may read my times and me,

Taught by my living words, when I shall cease to be.

LOVE IN THE LIBRARY.*

Edith Linsey was religious. There are many intensifiers (a new word, that I can't get on without: I submit it for admission into the language;)—there are many intensifiers, I say, to the passion of love; such as pride, jealousy, poetry, (money, sometimes, Dio mio!) and idleness: but, if the experience of one who first studied the Art of Love in an 66 Evangelical" country is worth a para, there is nothing within the bend of the rainbow that deepens the tender passion like religion. I speak it not irreverently. The human being that loves us throws the value of its existence into the crucible, and it can do no more. Love's best alchymy can only turn into affection what is in the heart. The vain, the proud, the poetical, the selfish, the weak, can, and do, fling their vanity, pride, poetry, selfishness and weakness into a first passion; but these are earthly elements, and there is an antagonism in their natures that is for ever striving to resolve them back to their original earth. But religion is of the soul as well as the heart, the mind as well as the affections, and when it mingles in love, it is the infusion of an immortal essence into an unworthy and else perishable mixture.

Edith's religion was equally without cant, and without hesitation or disguise. She had arrived at it by elevation of mind, aided by the habit of never counting on her tenure of life beyond the setting of the next sun, and with her it was rather an intellectual exaltation than a humility of heart. She thought of God because the subject was illimitable, and her powerful imagination found in it the scope for which she pined. She talked of goodness, and purity, and disinterestedness, because she found them easy virtues with a frame worn down with disease, and she was removed by the sheltered position of an invalid from the collision which tries so shrewdly in common life the ring of our metal. She prayed, because the fulness of her heart was loosed by her eloquence when on her knees, and she found that an indistinct and mystic unburthening of her bosom, even to the Deity, was a hush and a relief. The heart does not always require rhyme and reason of language and tears.

There are many persons of religious feeling who, from a fear of ridicule or misconception, conduct themselves as if to express a devout sentiment was a want of taste or good-breeding. Edith was not of these. Religion was to her a powerful enthusiasm, applied without exception to every pursuit and affection. She used it as a painter ventures on a daring colour, or a musician on a new string in his instrument. She felt that she aggrandized botany, or history, or friendship, or love, or what you will, by making it a stepping-stone to heaven, and she made as little mystery of it as she did of breathing and sleep, and talked of subjects which the serious usually enter upon with a suppressed breath, as she would comment upon a poem or define a new philosophy. It was surprising what an impressiveness this threw over her in every thing; how elevated she seemed above the best of those about her; and

* Continued from Vol. xliii., No. clxx., p. 169.

† “La paresse dans les femmes est le présage de l'amour.”—La Bruyère.

with what a worshipping and half-reverent admiration she inspired all whom she did not utterly neglect or despise. For myself, my soul was drank up in hers as the lark is taken into the sky, and I forgot there was a world beneath me in my intoxication. I thought her an angel unrecognised on earth. I believed her as pure from worldliness, and as spotless from sin, as a "cherub with his breast upon his lute;" and I knelt by her when she prayed, and held her upon my bosom in her fits of faintness and exhaustion, and sat at her feet with my face in her hands listening to her wild speculations (often till the morning brightened behind the curtains) with an utter and irresistible abandonment of my existence to hers, which seems to me now like a recollection of another life, it were, with this conscious body and mind, a self-relinquishment so impossible!

Our life was a singular one. Living in the midst of a numerous household, with kind and cultivated people about us, we were as separated from them as if the ring of Gyges encircled us from their sight. Fred wished me joy of my giraffe, as he offensively called his cousin, and his sisters, who were quite too pretty to have been left out of my story so long, were more indulgent, I thought, to the indigenous beaux of Skeneateles than those aboriginal specimens had a right to expect; but I had no eyes, ears, sense, or civility for anything but Edith. The library became a forbidden spot to all feet but ours; we met at noon after our late vigils and breakfasted together; a light sleigh was set apart for our tête-à-tête drives over the frozen lake, and the world seemed to me to revolve on its axle with a special reference to Philip Slingsby's happiness. I wonder whether an angel out of heaven would have made me believe that I should ever write the story of those passionate hours with a smile and a sneer! I tell thee, Edith! (for thou wilt read every line that I have written, and feel it, as far as thou canst feel anything) that I have read "Faust" since, and thought thee Mephistopheles! I have looked on thee since, with thy cheek rosy dark, thy lip filled with the blood of health, and curled with thy contempt of the world and thy yet wild ambition to be its master-spirit and idol, and struck my breast with instinctive self-questioning if thou hadst given back my soul that was thine own! I fear thee, Edith. Thou hast grown beautiful that wert so hideous-the wonder-wrought miracle of health and intellect, filling thy veins, and breathing almost a newer shape over form and feature: but it is not thy beauty; no, nor thy enthronement in the admiration of thy woman's world. These are little to me; for I saw thy loveliness from the first, and I worshipped thee more in the duration of a thought than a hecatomb of these worldlings in their life-time. I fear thy mysterious and unaccountable power over the human soul! I can scorn thee here, in another land, with an ocean weltering between us, and anatomize the character that I alone have read truly and too well, for the instruction of the world (its amusement, too, proud woman,-thou wilt writhe at that ;)—but I confess to a natural and irresistible obedience to the mastery of thy spirit over mine. I would not willingly again touch the radius of thy sphere. I would come out of Paradise to walk alone with the devil as soon.

How little even the most instructed women know the secret of this power! They make the mistake of cultivating only their own minds. They think that, by self-elevation, they will climb up to the intellects of