England, for 40 hectolitres equal 110 bushels, which gives 44 bushels per acre, whereas the average of 1870 (a very good year) was only 28 bushels according to the above returns. The correct figure would be 70 bushels per hectare, or 255 hectolitres as against 40. But, making all allowance for this error, the figures are certainly very remarkable. It is evident that Great Britain produces more corn per acre than any country in Europe by the labour of a far smaller portion of her people, thus leaving a much larger amount of labour free for the manufacture of wealth in other ways. This is a fact of the highest importance.* I do not say that it is by any means conclusive, but it deserves very careful consideration. The explanation, no doubt, is that more capital is habitually invested in English agriculture. As M. de Lavergne puts the case, speaking of the habits of English farmers :

"All invest money in the soil with perfect confidence. In this country (England) where industry and commerce are on all sides asking for capital, and promising it a brilliant return, there are still a great number who prefer agriculture to trade. While our cultivators (as they say themselves) shave an egg, and consider what is not spent as so much gained, in England the question is, who can put most money into the land. It is especially through the grande culture that considerable expenses have been incurred, it is that which gives every day the most striking examples of the spirit of industry applied to cultivation; but the moyenne and the petite cultivationfollow close on the heels of the other. The small farmer who has only a few thousand francs has no more hesitation than the great capitalist who has ten times or a hundred times as much. Both, at the same time, and more often than not on the security of a mere tenancy from year to year, engage in expenses which would seem to us enormous, and which only proprietors would undertake. . . . . Generally the substitution of horses for oxen and of machinery for manual labour in field work is attributed to the grande culture. So it is also said of the large purchases of manure and of improvements of all sorts. Here is a fresh confusion. The use of these perfected processes, that is to say, the intelligent employment of capital, is a sign rather of a rich and enlightened cultivation, than of cultivation on a great scale. Small farmers and farmers with moderate-sized holdings understand the advantages of these processes quite as well as the large holders, both in England and everywhere where cultivation is thus advanced; they are despised only by poor and ignorant husbandmen. Now, if English cultivation is rich, it is not less enlightened and skilful." ("Écon. Rur. de l'Angleterre," p. 128.)

In the same volume will be found an estimate of the produce of England as being just double that of France, and in his "Economie Rurale de la France" (p. 60), the same author calculates that it

* How important this consideration has appeared to be to economists of standing may be seen from the following extract from Mr. M'Culloch's notes to Adam Smith (p. 569) :—“This is the powerful spring that has done more, perhaps, than any other to carry our commerce and manufactures to their present unexampled extent, that impels us forward in the career of improvements, and enables us, without difficulty, to support what would otherwise be a very heavy load of taxes."

would take France three-quarters of a century to arrive merely at the point of agricultural development at which England had then arrived (1866). This is a remarkable testimony from the best witness in Europe, and one who is a warm admirer of peasant cultivation.

Another comparison, taken from the "Agricultural Returns, 1870," may be interesting

Very recently both Lord Derby and Lord Leicester have publicly expressed the opinion that the agricultural production of our country might be doubled, were our processes improved, and ample capital applied in their perfection; so that while we have surpassed our neighbours, we have yet much to do. We need, not merely more production per acre, but we also require a larger rural population, if we would secure that greater social stability which all desire, but which we shall look for in vain, so long as so vast a population of our people are crowded in the pestilent courts and alleys of our towns.

But it would be a very hasty and doubtful policy were we to endeavour suddenly to introduce the continental system by act of law, and not rather to wait for the more slow and sure results of an improvement of our laws as to the tenure of land. We can neither force men to dwell in the country, nor can we compel them to invest their capital in agriculture; but we can adopt a more natural law of inheritance, so as to have as few limited ownerships as possible, and in this way we should attract capital to the business of cultivation. By so doing we should quickly increase the numbers of our rural population, and we should also improve their condition, for the expenditure of money in improved dwellings and in modes of cultivation, which involve a higher scale of wages paid to workmen of a better class, must result in an improved mode of living amongst the whole people, to be followed or accompanied by a superior education and better morals. We may well be instructed by the good points of the continental system without seeking slavishly to copy it; and while removing the defects of our own laws, we may avoid hasty changes, which might really discourage the application of capital to agriculture. We might easily make far greater progress in production than we have yet done, and at the same time remove those hindrances which have made the condition of our rural population a disgrace to the most wealthy nation in the world. WILLIAM FOWLER.

THE PLACE OF MIND IN NATURE AND

INTUITION IN MAN.

THAT

HAT the universe we see around us was not always there, is so little disputed, that every philosophy and every faith undertakes to tell how it came to be. They all assume, as the theatre of their problem, the field of space where all objects lie, and the track of time where events have reached the Now. But into these they earry, to aid them in representing the origin of things, such interpreting conceptions as may be most familiar to the knowledge or fancy of their age: first, the fiat of Almighty Will, which bade the void be filled, so that the light kindled, and the waters swayed, and the earth stood fast beneath the vault of sky; next, when the sway of poetry and force had yielded to the inventive arts, the idea of a contriving and adapting power, building and balancing the worlds to go smoothly and keep time together, and stocking them with selfmoving and sensitive machines; and now, since physiology has got to the front, the analogy of the seed or germ, in itself the least of things, yet so prolific that, with history long enough, it will be as spawn upon the waters, and fill every waste with the creatures as they are. The prevalence of this newest metaphor betrays itself in the current language of science: we now "unfold" what we used to "take to pieces;" we "develop" the theory which we used to "construct; we treat the system of the world as an "organism" rather than a

"mechanism; we search each of its members to see, not what it is for, but what it is from; and the doctrine of Evolution only applies the image of indefinite growth of the greater out of the less, till from some datum invisible to the microscope arises a teeming universe.

In dealing with these three conceptions,-of Creation, Construction, Evolution,-there is one thing on which Religion insists, viz., that Mind is first, and rules for ever; and whatever the process be, is its process, moving towards congenial ends. Let this be granted, and it matters not by what path of method the Divine Thought advances, or how long it is upon the road. Whether it flashes into realization, like lightning out of Night; or fabricates, like a Demiurge, through a producing season, and then beholds the perfect work; or is for ever thinking into life the thoughts of beauty and the love of good; whether it calls its materials out of nothing, or finds them ready, and disposes of them from without; or throws them around as its own manifestation, and from within shapes its own purpose into blossom,-makes no difference that can be fatal to human piety. Time counts for nothing with the Eternal; and though it should appear that the system of the world and the ranks of being arose, not by a start of crystallization, but, like the grass or the forest, by silent and seasonal gradations, as true a worship may be paid to the Indwelling God who makes matter itself transparent with spiritual meanings, and breathes before us in the pulses of nature, and appeals to us in the sorrows of men, as to the pre-existing Deity who, from an infinite loneliness, suddenly became the Maker of all. Nay, if the poet always looks upon the world through a suppliant eye, craving to meet his own ideal and commune with it alive; if prayer is ever a "feeling after Him to find Him," the fervour and the joy of both must be best (sustained, if they are conscious not only of the stillness of His presence, but of the movement of His thought, and never quit the date of His creative moments. In the idea, therefore, of a gradual unfolding of the creative plan, and the maturing of it by rules of growth, there is nothing necessarily prejudicial to piety; and so long as the Divine Mind is left in undisturbed supremacy, as the living All in all, the belief may even foster a larger, calmer, tenderer devotion, than the conceptions which it supersedes. But it is liable to a special illusion, which the others by their coarsely separating lines manage to escape. Taking all the causation of the world into the interior, instead of setting it to operate from without, it seems to dispense with God, and to lodge the power of indefinite development in the first seeds of things; and the apprehension seizes us, that as the oak will raise itself when the acorn and the elements are given, so from its

germs might the universe emerge, though nothing Divine were there. The seeds no doubt were on the field; but who can say whether ever a Sower went forth to sow ? So long as you plant the Supreme Cause at a distance from His own effects, and assign to him a space or a time where nothing else can be, the conception of that separate and solitary existence, however barren, is secure. But in proportion as you think of Him as never in an empty field, waiting for a future beginning of activity, as you let Him mingle with the elements and blend with the natural life of things, there is a seeming danger lest His light should disappear behind the opaque material veil, and His Spirit be quenched amid the shadows of inexorable Law. This danger haunts our time. The doctrine of Evolution, setting itself to show how the greatest things may be brought out of the least, fills us with fear whether perhaps Mind may not be last instead of first, the hatched and full-fledged form of the protoplasmic egg; whether at the outset anything was there but the raw rudiments of matter and force; whether the hierarchy of organized beings is not due to progressive differentiation of structure, and resolvable into splitting and agglutination of cells; whether the Intellect of man is more than blind instinct grown self-conscious, and shaping its beliefs by defining its own shadows; whether the Moral sense is not simply a trained acceptance of rules worked out by human interests, an inherited record of the utilities; so that Design in Nature, Security in the Intuitions of Reason, Divine Obligation in the law of Conscience, may all be an illusory semblance, a glory from the later and ideal days thrown back upon the beginning, as a golden sunset flings its light across the sky, and, as it sinks, dresses up the East again with borrowed splendour.

This doubt, which besets the whole intellectual religion of our time, assumes that we must measure every nature in its beginnings; admit nothing to belong to its essence except what is found in it then; and deny its reports of itself, so far as they depart from that original standard. It takes two forms, according as the doctrine of Evolution is applied to Man himself, or to the outward universe. In the former case, it infuses distrust into our self-knowledge, weakens our subjective religion or native faith in the intuitions of thought and conscience, and tempts us to imagine that the higher they are, the further are they from any assured solidity of base. In the latter case, it weakens our objective religion, suggests that there is no originating Mind, and that the divine look of the world is but the latest phase of its finished surface, instead of the incandescence of its inmost heart. Let us first glance at the theory of HUMAN evolution, and the moral illusions it is apt to foster.

I. Under the name of the "Experience Philosophy," this theory