taken into partnership. The capitalist will have to learn to limit his desires and surrender part of his gains to those by whose toil they become possible.

This has begun to be dimly recognised. We have in this country more than one important industry where the wages of the workers are regulated in rough fashion by the gains of the capitalist, and there is not the least doubt that it would be for the latter's interest

to carry this principle further. As matters now stand the capitalist is positively injured by a prominent increase in his gains. On the one hand, his apparent good fortune is the signal for a fight between him and his workmen. They are keen enough to see that he is making more money that usual, and they-actuated by the same motives as his own--determine to secure a portion of this increased gain. Hence come strikes, the disorganization of industries, and the demoralization of both employers and employed. But that is not all. The augmented profits of the capitalist in a particular industry or trade excites the greed of other capitalists, who immediately set about to organize competition, in order to obtain a chance of making fortunes at the same rate. No sooner is this done than the market becomes glutted with the products of all these competitors, and after a little time losses take the place of profits.

We have a most signal example of this disastrous see-saw in the existing state of our coal and iron industries. These have never recovered from the excessive powers of production created under the stimulus of the period 1870 to 1872. Pits were opened, furnaces and works erected, under the excitement of the great gains of these years, and the consequence has been a chronic over-supply ever since. The struggle might have lasted a much shorter time had the stimulus not been universal, applying with nearly equal force in every coal and iron producing country; or had the limited liability system not been the one generally adopted here in the creation of competing works. But the causes that may have prolonged the depression are of less importance than the fact that it would never have existed to a ruinous extent at all had the workmen been permitted to share the profits of their employers during prosperity, because these profits would then have been kept down to such a point as must have removed much of the temptation to outside capitalists. A great many sneers were levelled at the miners and iron workers of those days. The newspapers were never tired of twitting them about their dog-fancying and champagnedrinking propensities. To twit them of these, whether the accusation was just or not, was esteemed sufficient answer to their demands for an increased wage. "They will only waste the money," it was said -as if their masters did aught else-and their claims were resisted on "high moral grounds," forsooth. From an economic point of view, leaving morals alone, this was the greatest possible mistake. Had the

workmen been given a fair proportion of the profits resulting from their industry, ruinous competition would have been checked, and the whole trade of the world would not now be dragging in the mire in a perpetual conflict against insolvency.

Apply this principle universally to all organised industries, and a counterpoise would be given to the inordinate demands of the capitalist. At the same time a community of interests would be established, tending to prevent these violent oscillations between poverty and profusion to which modern trade is so subject. Look, for instance, at our own great railway corporations. The capitalist there is everything, the thirty thousand men or more who do the work of these railways are nothing. In order to make good dividends, the sole aim of the directors and their few highly paid leading officials is to "keep down expenses," and above all wages. There are no large funds set aside to pension worn-out servants. The men have no hold at all upon the great soulless organisations for which they toil beyond their weekly pay. And that pay is universally poor for all but a mere handful of upper officials. I am credibly informed, for instance, that the actually responsible manager of the goods station at Euston -which is a huge vortex of business-receives less than £150 per annum. So powerful are these corporations that they manage effectually to crush attempts on the part of their men to organise themselves. A railway strike has little or no chance of success.

Some day or other this position of antagonism between holders of parchments and living souls must everywhere issue in disorganisation and conflict. The world has undergone a process of emancipation for two generations now, the like of which has never been seen before. At all points the labour of man has been relieved, supplemented, assisted by the inventions of science. Alongside this emancipation, however, we see a process of enslavement in existence whereby the benefits of the changes that have taken place flow directly towards the possessors of money, and only indirectly and in a lessening rather than increasing degree to the possessors of mere bone and sinew. The world will never make true progress on that footing. The selfseeking instincts of the masses, the great majority, must be considered as well as those of the rich minority. It is no use in one and the same breath telling the educated workman that he has the same birthright as the highest noble in the land, and that he must be contented with whatever wages it pleases organised capital to give him. But the admission of the toiler into partnership with the "captains of industry," or with the powerful organized companies of lenders of money, while it might lighten the loads of the mass of mankind and elevate their moral and social position would palliate only one of the evils from which the body politic now so universally suffers. It might distribute wealth more widely and check the

tendency of capital to accumulate more and more in the hands of the few, but it would do nothing whatever to stop debt expansion like that of France, or such as we see in our boroughs and in most English colonies. To do that other influences must come into play, and the most powerful of these is without doubt a readjustment of taxation in such a manner that those who vote increases of debt will be the men who have the most direct interest in keeping down public burdens. In this country, I may say in all civilised countries, this is not the case. The "log rolling" member of the United States Congress equally with the "jobbing" member of a colonial Assembly, or a French Chamber of Deputies, or an English Parliament, are all alike, men to whom the weight of taxation is a most secondary matter. They talk of economy when on the stump among their constituencies, and mostly forget all about it when elections are over and the power to tax is remitted to their hands. England suffers less, perhaps, in this respect than some other countries, just because the basis of her taxation has been reduced down to an extent that makes every addition to the public burdens felt in some degree by the wealthy, and because she is a great tribute-receiving nation. One might indeed say that the more democratic the institutions of a nation were the more completely free are its representatives in Parliament to load the people with debt. But that would not be accurate, though superficially it has a great appearance of truth. The real secret of the recklessness of nations in contracting debts is the character of their taxation. In France the burdens are mainly indirect. In the United States they are nearly all so, though not in the individual states of the union, and in the majority of our colonies the weight of debt upon the people is hid beneath the proceds of land sale, the revenues from public works, or in Canada and Victoria by the revenue from a protective tariff. The people consequently fail to realise what their elected guides are doing when they vote new loans, and will probably continue to sleep unsuspecting of danger until this or that prop fails, and the whole dead weight suddenly falls on their backs. Then when they have to tax themselves, when the wealthy must pay or perish, members of Parliament will cry out, perhaps repudiate the acts of their predecessors, to the great loss of the public creditor.

The same observation applies to borough taxation in England, though here likewise not universally and to the extent it does in Paris. Our local rates do not fall most severely upon the classes most able to bear them. The ground landlords in all our English boroughs, who let out their land in plots on eighty or ninety years' leases, escape the weight of the rates that menace to a crushing extent the occupier and tenant at will. Unquestionably in the not distant future this inequality must be put right. A taxation of rent in all

forms is, in fact, the best check possible on the tendency to corporate recklessness. If half the borough improvement and other rates were laid upon the ground landlords we should have a much less rapid enslavement of the masses, and the health of the body politic would be sounder throughout than it now is.

These are but hints and outlines. The subject is capable of far more extended treatment; but I have already outrun the space so kindly placed at my disposal, and must not further enlarge. The great point I wish to insist upon is, that the questions started in these essays are urgent ones, far more so than the generality of people are willing to believe. Prosperity by debt is an anomaly that cannot exist long anywhere. It must be followed by the usual adversity that borrowing involves even to the riches of communities. Nay, the nations that lend are, at bottom, worse off than those that borrow, because they become extravagant upon their usury; usury; and when their debtors plunge into bankruptcy, have themselves furthest to fall. The miserable debt-bound people who, finding their bonds unbearable, in time throw them off, have, as it were, the world before them. For England, then, the debt question is nearly as important in many respects as for France. Where should we stand were India to stop payment, as she must one day, lend to her as we may? By very dint of lending, indeed, we must ultimately bring that unhappy country to ruin. I might ask the same question about some at least of our colonies, but that also would create a fresh field of discussion. I therefore beg the reader, in conclusion, to ask questions of this order for himself, and to try to answer them, not by quibbles or the easy sneers of pious paganism, but by an honest examination of the facts. Whither is the universal bonding of men's labour carrying us all?

A. J. WILSON.

CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY.

February 17th, 1884.

It was not, to restore thy flickering breath,
Or hold thee back, just nearing towards the Light,
But--whilst that Sun of Life, whom we name Death,
Rose on thy closing, or thy opening sight—

To catch some whisper of thy new delight,
Some earnest of thy fainting soul's surprise,

And see the radiance quickening through the veil

Of palsied speech and leaden-lidded eyes,—

That we, bright Spirit! who stood and watched thee fail

And sink, and pass through gloom and utter night,

One instant, and no more, would fain have stayed thy flight!

I.

SCARCELY had the grave closed over the head of Charles Stuart Calverley, when those who had known him expressed a desire that some brief account of his character and career should be given to the world. It was thought, we may suppose, that the memory of one whose natural powers had made so extraordinary an impression upon his contemporaries, and whose published writings had given evidence, if not of commanding genius, yet certainly of a very distinct and striking individuality, should not be suffered to pass into oblivion without some more enduring record than a paragraph in the newspapers. It is in the belief that this was a well-grounded sentiment, and that those who have hitherto known C. S. C. only as a writer of polished and epigrammatical verse, would be glad, now that he is gone, to learn something of the personality which lay behind those familiar letters, that the present task has been undertaken; and it may be permitted here to express a wish that the work of delineating a character so unique though truly in this case a labour of love-could nevertheless have been committed into hands more practised than those of one, whom circumstances have long since consigned to the pursuit of avocations quite other than literary. It must be added that the uneventful record of Calverley's life contains no materials for a full and lengthened biography; all that can be attempted is to place before the reader's mind some slight sketch of the man, as he appeared in the eyes of his familiar friends.

A bright, sunny boyhood, fearless and careless; a youth full of brilliant promise, and studded with intellectual triumphs; a manhood marked by no stirring incidents, no ambitious struggles, no alternations of failure and success-darkened, alas! in later years,