willing rather than forego the pleasures of matrimony, to part with some other of their personal enjoyments, by entering soon upon this alliance; even though it should be so soon as that, through the medium of an increased population, they shall have at length to work for less wages than they might have otherwise preserved. And the capitalists may be willing, rather than forego the pleasures of accumulation, to part with some of their personal enjoyments, by sparing what they might have spent, and vesting the produce of their parsimony in business, even though, through the medium of an increased capital, they shall have to trade for less profit than they might otherwise have been able to sustain. Thus the increase of capital and the increase of population are the real impellent causes why the wages and profit which wont to absorb the whole produce of land of a given quality do not now absorb it. The competition between the labourers, now in greater number, on the one hand, and the more numerous or greater capitalists on the other, is such, that less than the whole produce is now shared between them, and the difference wherever land is appropriated goes to rent. Farmers in the existing state of profit, and wages, and cultivation, are willing to pay this rent for leave to settle on a land which formerly paid none; and should it so happen that there exists inferior land beside that which is rented, and whose produce is just less than that of the other by the difference of the rent, farmers will be equally willing to settle on this inferior land, paying no rent at all. But most assuredly it was not the existence of the inferior which originated a rent for the superior soil. It is not because farmers had descended to a worse, that they were willing to pay rent for a better; but because they were willing to pay rent for the better if they could have got it, they descended to the worse. The existence of the worse land, so far from originating a rent upon the better, prevented it from rising so rapidly as it would have done; because it afforded an outlet for the excess of population and capital; and thus slackened for a time their competition on the better land. The real cause of the rent is this more strenuous competition of labourers and capitalists, now more numerous than before; and this cause, assigned by Dr. Smith, ought not to be superseded, as if it were a distinct and different cause, by that which in fact is but a consequence from itself. This inversion of the truth has led to vicious conclusions in political economy, and, as is the effect of every false principle, it has mystified the science.

"Rent is not a creation of the will of the landlords, but a creation of the collective will of the capitalists and labourers. Whenever there is property in land, it is the unavoidable result of the one class choosing to multiply, and the other choosing to accumulate, beyond the capacity of the higher soils to sustain them. It can only be done away with by the abolition of that property; or, in other words, by turning the country into a large common, and dissociating all the activities of individual interest and hope from the business of cultivation. Labour would cease to attach itself to any given portion of the territory, if there were no fence of property by which the fruit of this la

bour might be guarded. This property has been termed monopoly, and all the odium which attaches to monopoly has been cast upon its holders. But the truth is, that the landlords are altogether innocent of the rent, which has flowed in upon them ab extra, not at their own bidding, but at the bidding of those who complain of its oppressiveness. The employer of labour would have had his workmen at a higher wage; but another stepped forward and implored to be taken in at a lower wage, who, if refused, would have been, in fact, the more aggrieved sufferer, or at least the more helpless outcast of the two. The owner of the land would have let his farm at a lower rent; but, in the importunity of capitalists, higher rents were offered; and he, by refusing these, would, in fact, have disappointed the most eager among the competitors. The landlord is passive under this operation. He is the subject, and not the agent in it. The primary and moving forces lie with the labourers on the one hand, and with the capitalists on the other the former, through the medium of an increased population, having brought on a lower wage than otherwise, by a necessity as irreversible as any law of nature; and the latter, through the medium of an increased capital, having, by the same necessity brought on a lower profit than otherwise. The difference goes to rent. The complainers of it are themselves the makers of it. That the origination of rent should be rightly understood, is a thing of far mightier interest to the commonwealth, than the mere intellectual comprehension of a process. It is an incalculable loss to the working classes, when the real cause of their sufferings is misconceived. It bewilders the friends of humanity from the path of amelioration. And, besides, it provokes a thousand undeserved antipathies-being the fruitful cause of those many heart-burnings and jealousies by which society is so grievously distempered.

Rent is inseparable from property in land, and can only be abolished by all the fences and landmarks of property being swept away from our borders. The effect would be as instant as inevitable. The cultivation of the fields would be abandoned. The population would be broken up into straggling bands—each prowling in quest of a share in the remaining subsistence for themselves; and, in the mutual contests of rapacity, they would anticipate, by deaths of violence, those still crueller deaths that would ensue in the fearful destitution which awaited them. Yet many would be left whom the sword had spared, but whom famine would not spare-that overwhelming calamity under which a whole nation might ultimately disappear. But a few miserable survivors would dispute the spontaneous fruits of the earth with the beasts of the field, who now multiplied, and overran that land which had been desolated of its people. And so by a series, every step of which was marked with increasing wretchedness, the transition would at length be made to a thinly scattered tribe of hunters, on what before had been a peopled territory of industrious and cultivated men. Thus, on the abolition of this single law, the fairest and most civilized region of the globe, which at present sustains its millions of families out of a fertility that now waves over its cultivated, be

cause its appropriated acres, would, on the simple tie of appropriation being broken, lapse in a very few years into a frightful solitude, or if not bereft of humanity altogether, would at last become as desolate and dreary as a North American wilderness."

We shall not be able to enter on the consideration of Mr. Stirling's chapters on the difficult subjects of money, and bullion, and rates of exchange in connexion with foreign trade. In his treatment of these, we apprehend a greater clearness of explanation than is to be met with in most other authors; and before the reader who has not yet succeeded in mastering this department of the science, shall give it up as hopeless and impracticable, we advise him to make a study of the monetary sketches, or we should rather say demonstrations, which are presented in this volume.

But there is one remaining topic suggested by the following extract at p. 103 of this work, which will take up all the remaining space that can be allowed for our article:

"By what means the standard of comfort and enjoyment which obtains among the great body of the people can be most effectually elevated or best maintained, and those provident habits upon which depend the relative supply and value of labour best engendered or secured, is a problem of absorbing interest, because of supreme practical importance,-one compared with which all our other speculations sink into insignificance; but it is a problem of which the science of value can afford no solution. To that science labour presents itself simply as a subject which can be sold or exchanged, and the value of which, in relation to other subjects of exchange, fluctuates with the relative increase or decrease of its quantity. With the causes of that increase or decrease our science has no more concern than with the causes of the increase or decrease of corn or broadcloth; and as the one subject is handed over to the agriculturist or the manufacturer, so must the other to the moralist, the politician, or the practical statesman. A theme of such moment and magnitude may well employ the best power s of the human mind, but it is not within the limits assigned to the present work."-Footnote, p. 103.

Mr. Stirling does not over-estimate the importance of the theme adverted to in this extract, and heither is he singular in rejecting it from the science of Political Economy. But, on the other hand, the economists in general seem little aware how much by thus stopping short at their own formulæ, they abridge the interest and the esteem which might otherwise be felt for their subject. They are the mixed mathematics which have raised the pure mathematics to a tenfold higher place than they would otherwise have occupied, in the respect not of the general only, but of the scientific public. But for their wondrous applications to astronomy, and the other branches of physics, they might have

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been ranked with the transcendental metaphysics, or any other science of profitless abstractions, which afford a mere play to the intellect, but without enlarging our acquaintance with the realities of the surrounding universe, or without application to the interests and affairs of the living world. And there is a class of mixed questions in danger of being lost sight of altogether-unless, indeed, by the invention of some uncouth name, as the economico-moral, or the theologico-economical, they have a place assigned to them in the list of sciences; and a structure be raised on the middle ground which they occupy, that might give them a standing in the encyclopædia of human knowledge. For without some such contrivance, and if our economists will persist in casting out from their domain every one topic, however urgent its importance might be, in which the moral and the economical are blended, there is no general likelihood of its being taken in by our divines. For if economists, on the one hand, will not recognise the importance of the Christian element in giving prosperous fulfilment and effect even to their own speculations, as, for example, how to secure that distribution of wealth which might best conduce to the general comfort and well-being of society on the other hand, our theologians bear marvellously little regard to political economy, as if the secularity of its title gave it somewhat of a heathenish aspect in their eyes. It is thus that between the two sciences, our subject, knocking at the door of each, and begging for admittance, is, we greatly apprehend, in the imminent danger of being fairly turned off, and becoming an outcast from both.

Nevertheless, we shall not despair. Experience will at length do what argument has failed to do. It will work that conviction which the reasonings of many long years have not been able to accomplish. To select two examples out of the many: the law of Pauperism which we deem to be wrong, and the law of Free Trade which is right-the one enacted some years ago both for Ireland and Scotland; the other but a few months ago for the whole empire. The former, brought on by a whining sentimentalism, in which our Evangelicals largely shared, will at length be found of pernicious effect in depressing the condition of the working classes; and the latter of no effect in raising it—or, in other words, the one destructive of the object, the other wholly inadequate for its fulfilment. We have long contended that the only specific for that attainment, after which so many of our patriots and philanthropists are now labouring as in the very fire, yet hitherto in vain-a diffused comfort and sufficiency throughout the masses-is a universal Christian education. The ministers of the Gospel may not understand the rationale of those economic forces which it is for them, and them only, to set a-going,

nor do we ask them to understand it. The dynamics of the process are in their hands, whether or not they comprehend their mode of operation. The economists ought to comprehend it, but will not listen to the demonstration, as if the very sound of the Gospel, like that of a strange matter brought to their ears, scared them away; or as if they resented the invasion of such a visitant on that territory which is peculiarly theirs. Meanwhile time, the most powerful of all demonstrators, will at length evince the glorious harmony which subsists between truth in every one department and truth in every other; and most strikingly of all, the wisdom of that God, who amid the puny speculations of men, each contracted within his own little sphere, so adjusts the parts and relations of His wondrous universe, that the economy of His works will ever subserve the economy of His word, and so as to ensure for godliness the promise of the life that now is, as well as of the life which is to come. Whether for individuals or nations, it will be found true, that if they seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, all other things shall be added to them.

It is thus that the controversy, whether the economical should precede the moral, or the moral the economical, in the treatment of our population-a question which has already been scripturally pronounced upon-will at length be experimentally settled. For ourselves, we should not contend for the precedency of the moral in the order of time, if both the one and the other were adopted contemporaneously, and acted on immediately. But we have a very strong conviction, that, in the order of cause and effect, the moral is the grand, nay, the indispensable precursor of all those reforms in the state of the people, which the most enlightened public men of our day are most set upon. But it is a sad inversion of the order, when the attempt to moralize is deferred on the imagination, that first to raise them economically is the indispensable precursor of such an accomplishment. We, on the contrary, hold that Christianity is to any great extent the alone effectual engine for the moralization of the people; and that, as in the days of Paul, Christianity should be addressed instanter to the Barbarian as well as to the Greek. It is never too soon to address the consciences, or the religious fears and feelings of men; and all experience attests that this might be done with as great, perhaps greater success, among the most sunken of nature's children, as among those more elevated in the scale of society, after which every secular and secondary interest of theirs might with all safety be committed to their own discretion, and left with all confidence in their own hands. But this, although in our judgment the only specific for the amelioration of the masses, is to be postponed we fear indefinitely, giving way to every other expedient which must first be tried.