shoulders. Long after he and his apostle, Whitfield, had transferred their activity from the Church which had driven them out, to other and freer fields, they declared themselves to be true members of the Established Church. First in 1785, and more positively in 1795, the "Evangelical movement," as it was at first called, was consolidated into the Methodist sect, which now numbers in England alone a million of members (some say, 2,400,000), and in America two millions. Nevertheless, it began from that time to decline, for "although powerful religious movements always emanate from the classes which are inaccessible to philosophical culture, they are nevertheless doomed to become unfruitful unless they are capable of assimilating some philosophical element" (Leslie Stephen). This unfruitfulness must be understood, however, only of Methodism as a sect. Wesleyanism, as a historical fact, was abundantly fruitful. It gave new life to the State Church, roused it to resistance, and discovered to it its own weak points.

Such movements, however, arising out of feeling, always produce in the end a reactionary effect, as had been already shown in the case of German pietism, while, on the other hand, rationalistic movements are, of necessity, always progressive. The Tractarianism, Puseyism, Ritualism of the present century, which would never have arisen but for the impulse given by Wesleyanism, are thoroughly reactionary in their

nature.

Thus has this much-calumniated Eighteenth Century, which produced such fair flowers and noble fruits on the Continent, left deep and beneficial traces also in England. It was an era of increased political liberty, of revival in literature, and of remarkable religious development. This should be remembered by the Radicals, advanced thinkers, and High Churchmen who are wont to look back with so much contempt on the age of their grandfathers. A century in which England twice, at the commencement and at the close, defended European independence against schemes of universal monarchy, and built up and perfected its own internal Constitution; an age which produced, from "Gulliver” to "Hallowe'en," a series of literary masterpieces such as no other nation in the world possesses; an age which exercised the most complete religious toleration the world has ever seen, without falling a prey to religious marasmus,—such a century need not shrink from comparison with any other, even in the glorious annals of English history.

KARL HILLEBRAND.

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS.

"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!"-ISAIAH V. 8.

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HERE is no ingredient in what may be called the raw material of society more important than landed property; and no fact connected with this ingredient more important than its well-proportioned and well-balanced distribution through all the classes of which the State, as an organized society of human beings, is composed. How this arises we may readily see; because, before the growth and expansion of manufactures, which are always secondary in the development of the social forces, and in their full blossom deal in much that is superfluous, in all countries the land was the quarry out of which the possibility of existence was evolved; the foundation on which depended both the number and the character of the men that formed the nucleus, and were to remain the bones and sinews, of the body social. The land was the scene on which the great drama of social life was enacted; the root out of which the most necessary element of popular well-being firmly grew; that part of the social organism which was at once most permanent in its character, most firm in its hold, and most vivifying in its associations. If Pro aris et focis be the great and most potent battle-cry of all nations, who by virtue of this cry achieved for themselves a place amongst noble and independent peoples, pro agris might have been present by implication to complete the triad; for the patriotic passion is robbed of its most powerful feeder when the family and the fireside are left without their natural adjunct in the field. A man with gold in his pocket may prosper anywhere; and a lucrative trade in articles for which there is a large demand may be carried on by the sagacious capitalist in any part of the world; but the possession of landed property makes a man naturally belong to a definite spot; and the facts, and the forces, and the associations of the spot make him feel a home there, and there only, as a bird feels in its nest. It must, therefore, be the aim of every wise State to have as many persons as

possible brought up under the influence of this firmest of social bonds, and this most potent of patriotic inspirations; in other words, a wellcalculated distribution of landed property among the citizens is, and always must be, one of the principal objects of a wise Government.

This being the case, we shall not be surprised to find that this matter of the wide distribution of landed property among the citizens was one of the principal points on which the legislation of the most notable free peoples of antiquity turned; and the great point kept in view by these legislators seems to have been equality; at least, such a distribution of the landed property-the qualification for citizenship as would prevent its becoming a monopoly, and, as such, an instrument of oppression, in the hands of a few. Citizens were not to be beggars; and in order to prevent them being such, arrangements must be made to hinder the common soil of the fatherland from being usurped and used for purposes of private aggrandisement by the few. In his account of the foundation of Rome an ancient writer tells us that two jugers of land were allotted to each citizen. Now, though no man who has any critical knowledge of history would accept this statement with regard to these early times as a literal historical fact, it may certainly be taken as representing an almost universal notion entertained by the ancients that, if not an absolute equality, certainly a very free distribution of landed property among the citizens, was an essential condition-precedent of a Constitutional State. Aristotle, accordingly, in his "Politics"* (a book which ought to be the vade mecum of every practical politician), while he disapproves of certain laws proposed by theoretical speculators in order to create and perpetuate a race of absolutely equal proprietors, has no hesitation in condemning emphatically the later development of the Spartan Constitution, according to which the land had become concentrated in the hands of a few, and the many left in landless misery; for this monopoly of the land in the natural course of things led to the depopulation of the country, and the diminution of the number of free and independent Spartans; whereas the State requires not only a large population for public service, but a population as much as possible founded on the distribution of landed property among the citizens. And, besides this, as he states again and again, great inequality in this important adjunct, or rather foundation, of citizenship, is apt to cause discontent, and to set class against class in a constant fret of jealousy, hatred, and strife. Indeed, his opinion on this subject is only the unavoidable application of the great cosmical principle which he was the first to set forth categorically and to illustrate in detail, that all extremes are wrong, a principle in every respect well worthy to be sealed for ever with the name of an intellect at once the most comprehensive, the most commanding, and the most practical, that the world has ever known. In obedience to this maxim we may certainly start with the postulate that in all agrarian questions

* ii. 9.

very small properties, and very large properties, as a rule, are equally wrong; and as for equality, we may say yet further, that in the way that doctrinaire theorists and communists conceive it, it is neither desirable nor possible. Not desirable, because monotony and an absolute level of any kind is tiresome and stupid; not possible, because the allwise and all-wealthy Creator has made luxuriant variety, and not bald uniformity, the key-note, so to speak, of the sublime hymn of His creative energy which we call the world. Plant two seedlings from the same nursery, upon the same hillside, on the same soil, and under influences apparently identical, yet they will not grow up exactly alike; and if this be the case with two trees, it will be the case much more with two hundred or two thousand trees; with the number planted and the space of ground covered, the chances of variety in size and solidity, in leafy luxuriance and in graceful symmetry, continually increase. Absolute equality among men, as among trees, is a dream. Let us suppose that a new colony is founded by a company of exiles from their native country altogether destitute of capital, having only brain and muscle to subdue to the use of man the rich extent of the uncultivated wilderness. Let it be taken as a just arrangement (though for many reasons it might be both unjust and inexpedient) that the occupied land should be divided among a hundred colonists equally in lots, say, of twelve acres; it is manifest that if, in order to realize the speculative Paradise of a certain class of doctrinaire thinkers, this arrangement were made by law perpetual, so that none of the original colonists or their descendants could, by any possibility, be left landless in the midst of their landed brethren, the effect of this would be to stifle altogether the impulse to exertion in the hands of the more industrious, and, what is worse, to maintain the idle and worthless upon the soil which they had neither the capacity nor the desire to cultivate. Not that any of the colonists should set his heart absolutely on the acquisition of more territory at the expense of his neighbour, but simply that when his neighbour fails to do his duty to the soil, it is for the public weal that no hindrance should be set in the way of its falling into the hands of the man who knows how to use it. If a man will not work, neither shall he eat. The State can have no interest in keeping a man upon the land with the nominal dignity of a citizen proprietor who lets his lot lie fallow, cherishing the grand growth of rushes, dock, and ragweed, rather than salubrious corn, and barley, and rye. It is far better that his prudent and industrious neighbour should grow big at his expense than that he should be protected in his indolence, as a cumberer of the ground, and the breeder, belike, of a spawn of children more worthless and more profitless than himself. Let accumulation, therefore, as in other cases, have its natural scope in land. The survival of the stronger in its own province is a very proper law. A wise forester increases the value of his forest by seasonably thinning the trees; no wise statesman will endeavour artificially to prevent the natural thinning process of Nature

in society which she achieves in favour of those who have insight to discern, enterprise to start, and resolution to follow forth any fruitful scheme that advances by grades of steady growth to the natural climax of a well-merited accumulation.

But accumulation how far? Ay, there's the rub; for, if accumulation is to go on beyond a certain point, more and ever more, we have Aristotle pulling the rein immediately-Aristotle, who never errs, and Nature at his back, and the evangelical prophet Isaiah, too, as our text seems most distinctly to assert. We must, therefore, set ourselves to inquire where and how, in the wonderful remedial processes which, through much tribulation occasionally, she is always instituting, Nature has provided some self-acting machinery by which the great evil of landmonopoly in the social state may be prevented. And here, happily, we have not far to seek. When a man dies, his property, by the law of Nature, is either divided among his children, or, as belonging to nobody, it falls to the State; or it may be disposed of in any way that the laws of the State have chosen to mark out. In other words, family claims and laws of succession are the machinery provided by Nature for the redistribution of lawfully accumulated property. But this matter requires to be looked into more narrowly. In the first place, it may be asked, Is a man, by the law of Nature, entitled to make a testament, so as to have it respected after his death? Certainly not. The claims of the family to the land of the deceased father no doubt are natural; and a father may, if he please, as in the evangelical parable, give to each of his sons, during his lifetime, the portion that falls to him; but when he is once gone the stage is clear, and, whatever his wish and preference while alive may have been, the survivors have rights to assert above which the desire of a departed person can have no call to despotize. On the demise of a landowner, there may be very valid reasons, both economical and political, why the sons should take the property rather than the daughters, or the eldest son rather than the other sons, or the elder brother rather than any of the sons; in short, in many ways the succession to a landed estate may be so doubtful, and leave room for so many disputes, that it will require an express enactment of the State to vest firmly any property in the act of passing from the dead to the living. Here, therefore, the wisdom or the folly of legislators comes in; and here is the well-head of all the blessing or bane that has followed to society from the legal right of making a testament, and the laws of heritable succession which rule the cases where a testament may not have been made. Nature evidently, by the claims of the children, which arise out of the natural social monad-the family-as we have already said-means distribution; but how that distribution shall be managed she leaves to man, as the natural agency by which she carries out her purposes. Well, it is manifest, as Aristotle also remarks, that the equal distribution of the land, after the death of the owner, if the property be small, tends to beggary; of which examples are easily found