without this they would be neither natural nor healthy; they would be destructive.

If property were altogether at the disposal of the law or the State there would be as many possible forms of combination, division, and distribution of it as there are utopias and dreams in the heads of the reformers of society, or of schemes, whether selfish or otherwise, in the heads of professional agitators and politicians. There would be no stability, no security, no peace. A sword of Damocles would hang perpetually over the head of industry, energy and progress. No man would be sure of the results of his activity whether physcial or mental. A scramble for office and power would demoralize and corrupt the commonwealth to a degree for which the most democratic states of the present could supply no parallel. The worst and most dangerous form of tyranny, a bureaucratic despotism, would crush beneath its feet the most sacred of individual rights. When all the wealth of the community passed through the fingers of a horde of officials the amount of it that would stick would inevitably leave things far worse than they are now, besides being the purchase-money taken from our own pockets for whatever spiritual and civil liberties we enjoy.

The other point which I wish to emphasize before concluding the present paper is, that wealth which is abused is an evil and that unlimited accumulations of wealth in the hands of one man or of a few may become oppressive and unjust to the community at large. It would, then, be the duty of both Church and State to determine how far and how much such an accumulation violates the rights of others, and to what extent it should be restricted or circumscribed. The wisdom of the world so far has not been in a hurry to intervene even in extreme cases, knowing that it is false economy to put artificial limits to human endeavour or to impede the springs of man's activity, intelligence, and skill by the restraints of law. I cannot help recalling here a passage which I published some years ago from a work of M. Thiers, in which this view is

1 La Proprieté, p. 66.

developed to its utmost limit. Speaking of wealth, he says:

If it offends some, it excites others, encourages, animates, sustains them; and society finds in it so many advantages for the generality of its members that it ignores the grumbling and discontent of the few. After all, manual labour is not the only kind of labour. You must also have men to apply the compass to paper, to study the movements of the stars, to teach us how to cross the seas. You must have men to investigate the annals and the efforts of other nations, to discover the cause of the prosperity and decay of empires, and to teach us how to rule. It is not the man who, from day to day, remains bent over his machine, or over the soil, who will have leisure or capacity for such pursuits. You may indeed find a peasant who will one day turn out to be the great Sforza, or a compositor in a printinghouse to become Benjamin Franklin. But these exceptions are rare. It is rather the sons of the toiler, raised above their condition by a laborious father, who will mount the steps of the social ladder and reach the sublime heights of thought.

The father was a peasant, a workman, a sailor. The son will be a farmer, a manufacturer, the captain of a ship. The grandson will be a banker, a surgeon, a barrister, perhaps one day head of the State. . . . Thus the human vegetation operates, and little by little is formed the wealthy class of society, which is called idle but is not so; for the work of the mind is value for that of the hands, and must ever succeed it if society is not to return to barbarism. I recognize that amongst these rich people there will be some, unworthy sons of wise fathers, who will spend their days at the gaming-table and their nights at pleasure, who will become stupid with drink, dissipating in idleness and debauchery their youth, their health, and their fortune. That is all true. But they will soon enough be punished. Their career blighted before its time, their substance wasted, they will wander sad, disfigured, and poor, before those palaces which their fathers had built and which now must pass into the possession of wiser and better men. In a generation you see labour rewarded in the father and idleness punished in the son. O envy, implacable envy, art thou not satisfied?

But are all the children of the rich of this description? It is true that they do not dig, nor spin, nor wield the hammer in the forge. But do they not read, study, teach, discover, govern? If it is not the rich man who always makes the discoveries that contribute to our welfare, it is he sometimes. It is he who encourages them. It is he who contributes to form

the learned public for whom the modest savant labours. It is he who has large libraries, who reads Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Galileo, Descartes, Bossuet, Molière, Racine, Montesquieu. If it is not he, it is at his house, around him, near him that they are read, criticized, appreciated, and that you find the enlightened polished society, with fine taste and trained judgment, for which genius writes, sings, and paints. Sometimes he will not be satisfied with admiring the works of others. He will produce some of his own. He will be the rich Sallust, the rich Seneca, the rich Montaigne, the rich Lavoisier, the rich De Medici, the glory of that republic which was most fertile in riches and in art, which spread over Europe its cloth, silk, velvet, wrought gold and silver, coinage, credit, the knowledge of banking, and gave to the world Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Galileo, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michael Angelo.

There are other benefits conferred by wealth which are not specifically enumerated in this passage. It has endowed our towns and cities with hospitals, schools, scientific and industrial institutions which react in the most beneficent way upon the fortunes of the poor.

But it is not in the interest of wealth, or of the wealthy classes, that I have developed this argument, or quoted the words of a famous statesman. We must give even 'Dives' his due; but when all is said that can be said in his favour, we cannot blink the fact which stares us in the face, that in the midst of abounding and defiant wealth there are millions of our fellow-men either starving or on the brink of starvation. Making all allowances for the number who have gone under through their own fault there are myriads who are still the victims of the social conditions in which we live.

Charity has not reached them. Philanthropy has not rescued them. 'Dives' has left them to their fate. The provision made for them in Christian days has been swept away. The rights of commonage, of pasture, and of gleanage, which they enjoyed so widely and so freely in the Middle Ages, have been confiscated. The religious houses which fed and clothed so many of them with a tender regard for their bodies as well as their souls have been stripped of their possessions. The patrimony which is their due is withheld from them by worldly and selfish materialists.

Great numbers of them are truly in a condition of unjust misery-injusta miseria, as Leo XIII terms it—clothed in rags, hungry and cold, living in surroundings unworthy of the dignity of the human person.

It is undoubtedly the duty of the Christian Church not only to help and comfort and console those who are thus afflicted, but to assert and defend their rights by every means in her power. And when she finds that individuals will not hear her voice, and that her own resources will stand no greater strain, there seems nothing for it but to invoke the intervention of that power which representsor should represent-the sense of justice, of humanity, and of brotherhood of the whole community. On that power she should exert all the pressure at her command to force it to discharge responsibilities which fall to it now with a double weight. Well and nobly have many States responded to this call, and are responding at the present day. But he who runs may read. Anyone who walks our streets or turns into the slums of a large city or the wretched lanes of our little country towns, to say nothing of the rural slums that abound on all sides, will see how much remains to be done. Numberless, however, are the ways of doing it besides having recourse to the wildest, most foolish, and least effective of the remedies proposed.

J. F. HOGAN, D.D.

THE BETTING EVIL

HE Report of the Joint Select Committee on Lotteries

TH and Indecent Advertisements, recently published as

a Parliamentary Paper, recognizes the alarming consequences that are likely to follow from the modern spirit of gambling and speculation, and makes some suggestions for leglisation, in order that the law may be enabled to check the evil in certain directions. The Committee were of opinion that some steps should be taken to deal more effectually with the advertisement and publication of foreign lotteries. They recommended, too, that it should be made illegal for any newspaper proprietor, publisher, or editor to charge any form of entrance fee (including the purchase and return of coupons) for prize competitions in his paper. They do not recommend the repeal of the Art Union Act, but are of opinion that the Board of Trade should exercise a stricter vigilance over the proceedings of Art Unions.

For various reasons legislation cannot be expected to have much direct influence on such classes of social evil; many forces prevent the enactment of anti-gambling laws, and tend to keep them inoperative when enacted. Even though these recommendations passed into law, and these particular forms of the abuse could be prevented, yet as long as the spirit of gambling and senseless speculation possessed large sections of the community, so long would that spirit find opportunities of exercising itself. If laws succeeded in stopping the limerick' competitions, we may make up our minds that most of the people that formerly gambled in limericks' would henceforth gamble in something else. The most advantageous effects we can look for from such laws, and the discussions that lead up to them, will be their influence on public feeling, by enlightening the public mind, and stirring up the public conscience to the folly and immorality of the abuses they condemn. It is undoubtedly desirable that occasions of gambling, as of