were suited to convey. are the lessons yet laid to heart; and their gravity and imminence will be most adequately comprehended by those who realise at once the increasing influence of the operative classes in the political arena, and the warm sympathy which, in spite of their grievous misguidance and their perverse mistakes, their condition still commands among the thinking and stirring classes of the nation.

These are not yet over, nor

G

V.

OBLIGATIONS OF THE SOIL.

THERE is a notion widely prevalent, habitually asserted by some, carelessly admitted by others, often formalised into a proposition, and usually taken for granted because scarcely ever denied or argued, which nevertheless would appear to be questionable; and which, till questioned and sifted, must not be suffered to grow into an axiom. The earth, we are told, has been given as an inheritance to mankind at large, not to this or that generation, or to this or that tribe or nation, far less to this or that class or section of a people, but as a source of sustenance to all, for the support and maintenance of succeeding and increasing generations of men; that, in fact, it was designed to grow food for man; that by no right, or justice, or propriety can it be diverted to any other purpose or neglected for this purpose; that its allotment to this or that set of holders, whether communal or individual, can only be warranted on the plea that such appropriation is best fitted to develop its resources :—that, in fine, and to speak broadly, it is the duty of the land to support as large a population as possible, and that the criterion by which all use and tenure of land must

be judged is its fulfilling, or tendency to fulfil, this great end.

The proposition is asserted and proclaimed with every gradation of latitude and positiveness; and, prima facie, it contains so much truth and plausibility, that it is not easy to detect, in its varying forms, where fallacy and extravagance begin. The advocates of the masses, who ffect to defend their interests and to speak in their name, boldly maintain the indefeasible natural claim of every man to as much land as is needed to support him, and denounce the proprietor who turns sheep-farms into deer forests, and the crofts and holdings of wretched cottiers into sheepwalks, as a robber and oppressor, and the nobleman who insists upon his acres of ornamental but unprofitable lawn, while the labourers-a score of whom that lawn, if in potatoes, might support-are half starving round his park, as not far off a murderer. Others point out that all civilised nations scout the claim of the savage hunter, who needs fifty square miles of forest and wild land to supply him with the game on which he feeds, and make no scruple of dispossessing him and turning his land to more productive uses : and then ask wherein his case differs from that of the Highland Ducal Chief, who keeps thousands of acres as wilderness and wood for the sake of the stags and grouse which give him little beyond sport. A recent writer, more moderate in appearance, holds the landowners of England to have grievously failed in their duty to their countrymen because the soil produces

only half what it might be made to yield, and implies not obscurely, that this failure on their part ought to be remedied by a different distribution of their neglected acres. Adherents of the Land and Labour League would have the State gradually obtain the ownership of the soil, and allot to every man the five or ten acres which they deem his due; while Mr Atherton is more precise, and would solve the problem by assigning to every baby an acre of land in the parish in which it happened to be born. Political economists, as a rule, have not troubled themselves to contest the fundamental assumption that it is obligatory on the land to produce as much food, and to maintain as large a population as it can; indeed, have tacitly accepted the doctrine-evading rather than discussing it; and have argued merely that private proprietorship, and probably large properties, offer the greatest likelihood of obtaining this maximum result; or they have met all practical inferences of a subversive or spoliative tendency by pointing out that though a man may be entitled to five or ten acres as his portion of God's bequest, he is not entitled to it in any special locality he may prefer; that practically the land of the globe is unlimited in extent, and a vast proportion of it still virtually unappropriated; and that till all this is disposed of, no man can be entitled to dispossess his neighbour.

We think it is time to ask whether the fundamental assumption on which such a superstructure is coming to be built is a truism or a fallacy-whether the soil

is bound to produce as much human food as possible —whether, in very deed, Providence designed the earth to be cultivated and peopled up to its maximum capacity—and whether it should be the aim of statesmen to co-operate in the fulfilment of that supposed design-whether, in fine, the whole globe cultivated and cropped like one vast market garden-England "with every rood of ground maintaining its man” is precisely that golden age, that culminating point of progress, that finished goal and ideal of humanity, that we contemplate and desire.

Now, one of the safest and most effectual modes of dealing with a doctrine of which you scent the unsoundness, but do not distinctly discern wherein the error lies, is to trace out the consequences which flow from it, and the conclusions to which, logically followed out, it will ultimately lead us. If these are obviously inadmissible, then the doctrine may confidently be pronounced fallacious.

dum of geometry. before us.

This is the reductio ad absurLet us apply it to the case

First, then,—if it be true that land ought to be made as productive as it can be, and that every owner or occupier is bound, in justice to his fellow-men or fellow countrymen, to make the soil he cultivates yield the maximum amount of human food, it follows indisputably that those crops, only or preferentially, must be grown which give this maximum result. A farmer or proprietor who grows a comparatively innutritive crop is guilty proportionally of the same derelic