only 48,098 acres. The Registrar General's Returns of the Census of 1871 set the population of the Isle of Wight at 66,219. Upon these figures he remarks: "To the attractions of the Isle of Wight, as a place of permanent residence and as a seaside resort, are attributed its large increase of population, there being in 1871 an increase of 2,000 houses, and of 11,000 persons." In other words, the overflowing wealth of the well-to-do classes in England, and not the natural increase of its native population, has added in the last decade to its population one fifth. The same Report returns the population of the Channel Islands at 89,504. In this there is no increase on the population of twenty years back; which shows, as more wealth is year by year extracted from their soil, that in these Islands self-restraint is practised and self-respect felt throughout the general mass of the population. We must also bear in mind that of the area of the Islands a considerable proportion is quite irreclaimable, for they are all mainly of granite formation, at a general elevation of between two and three hundred feet above the sea. This gives to each island, in most parts of its circuit from its upper plateau to the sea, a wide margin of descent, upon which fertile soil cannot accumulate, and a poor and scanty pasturage, its only possible produce, is generally more or less overpowered by brake, gorse, or heath. In Guernsey the proportion of this waste margin to the cultivable soil is one third, or more than 5,000 acres. The proportion is greater in Alderney and Sark, but not so great in Jersey. Still, if the population of the Isle of Wight were as dense as that of these Islands, it would rise from its recently augmented amount of 66,219 to 161,676; while in them the population, if its ratio to acreage were that of the Isle of Wight, would sink from 89,504 to 36,689. Density, however, of population would be a very unsatisfactory condition, if it resulted from contented habituation to an insufficient or poor mode of life in respect of food, clothing, fuel, and housing. Of this there is no indication in the Channel Islands. On the contrary, all that one sces in them speaks of sufficiency, ease, and prosperity throughout all classes. The number of substantial houses in the environs of their two towns surprises one who calls to mind the smallness of the islands of which they are the capitals. In the country parishes, too, good houses abound. One accustomed to the uninhabited look of so large a proportion of the rural parishes of England wonders how the possessors of so many good houses as he sees here can find the means to live in them. So with the better class of houses: the same is observable with respect to the houses of the peasantry and of the artisans. A month's search for something of the mean and dilapidated kind not unknown among ourselves was quite unsuccessful. I went into several cottages, all of which I found well built, roomy enough, and in good repair. This was very remarkable in the houses of the peasantry. As to the clothing of their inmates, I nowhere saw

the dirt and rags which so frequently shock us here at home, as signs both of actual pressing want, and of the decay, or extinction, of self-respect.

But to the eye of one who may be visiting these Islands indications of the well-to-do condition of the people are presented on every side. The churches I saw were large for the acreage of their respective parishes those of Jersey average about 2,300 acres, and were well kept. So much so, indeed, in most cases, that one could not but notice their dimensions and condition. They evidently belong to large congregations, who take a pride in them. The churchyards told the same tale. They are as carefully kept as the churches, and contain what to English eyes is an unusual proportion of solid tombs and massive tombstones. It is plain that here there are few so poor as to be obliged to bury their dead in unnamed graves.

In accord with the testimony of the churches and of the churchyards is that of the village schools, judging by what a passer-by can see both of the buildings and of the little scholars. So also, particularly in Jersey, is the excellent condition of the roads, and the dressiness, almost everywhere, of the roadside margins. These generally consist of stone walls, or well-trimmed hedges, or earthbanks, upon, or beside, which are rows of trees, sometimes fruit-trees, all of which, whether fruit-bearing or timber trees, are carefully tended. This dressiness of the roadside in rural districts is again something new to English visitors, and adds much to the pleasure of a day's walk or drive in the interior of Jersey. To the thought it is even more pleasing than to the eye, for it intimates that every cultivator loves and is proud of his land, and is desirous that it should present a fair appearance to his neighbours and to the casual passerby. It shows, too, that, with the careful attention which is found only in small cultivators who are at the same time owners of the soil, he is making the most of his opportunities; for these trees, which he plants on his roadside boundary bank, will some day send down their roots into the roadside margin, and even extend them into what soil there may be beneath the road itself, and will find space for expansion above the road, without detriment to grass or corn. With such cultivators nothing is lost.

An interesting and instructive witness to the condition of a population is its general market. Everywhere in the world, except in our own country, we find markets of this kind flourishing, and forming a marked feature and largely-used instrument in the economical organization of their respective localities. Here the now almost universal rule is that the old market-place, in which such markets were once held, still remains, but markets are no longer held in it. The reason of this is that both the people who supply a general market, and the people who use it, and who are to be found in all other parts of the world, have been extinguished amongst our

selves. The people who supply a market of this kind are not extensive cultivators, but peasant proprietors. Of these each does all that ingenuity and labour can to turn every square foot of his little estate to the best account. Every scrap and corner of it, and what they are producing, and what they can be made to produce next year, or a dozen years hence, are constantly mapped in his mind's eye. Here is a bit of wall, or an angle in a back yard, where there is room for a fig or a plum tree. The fig or the plum tree is planted before this bit of wall, or in this angle, and is carefully tended. His little bit of grass land will support a few apple-trees. The apples before long will be ripening above the grass. Before his potatoes are out of the ground, beet or broccoli is set between the rows. No leaf of this beet or broccoli will rot on the plant, but, as soon as it has done its duty to its parent, will be culled for the cow. The cow will supply milk and butter or cheese for the market. Cows and pigs and poultry are each kept in part as save-alls, and all alike for the market. These are the people who supply the market. Every week the good housewife herself brings to the accustomed stall all that she has ready for sale. This insures that everything the locality can produce (and under this system every locality can be made to produce a great variety of good things) should be exhibited in the marketplace in great abundance, and at very moderate prices. In the Guernsey vegetable market I counted upwards of a hundred of these peasant women in their stands at one time, many of them exhibiting upwards of twenty baskets of garden and dairy produce.

Those who have any familiarity with the growing difficulty experienced in this country, possibly a result of our present system of land tenure, in supplying the working classes in our towns with vegetables, fruit, eggs, butter, and milk, will regard such a market. as that of Guernsey as of no small advantage to a locality. Everybody knows that for these articles, by no means of small significance in the dietary of a people, and which there are perhaps no natural impediments to our procuring from our own soil, we are now paying many million pounds a year to foreign peasant proprietors: the price in each case being fully doubled by the cost of land and sea transport. This is a fact which must very appreciably affect the diet, the habits, the expenditure, and the health of our people. All can see that it must be so in the very important particular of milk, which never fails where the class of peasant proprietors exists, but which is now failing us to so great a degree, that in many of even our rural districts-it is so very generally—the children of the poor have to be very largely brought up without it. Here at all events is a fact which all can verify for themselves, and which is not so unimportant that any one can deem it a waste of time to consider what is its cause; whether that cause is artificially produced; and whether, if it be

artificially produced, it is irremediable. A varied, abundant, and cheap supply of vegetables and of fruit, is as necessary an ingredient in the dietary of adults as milk is in that of children.

But, however, another requisite besides that of favourable conditions for production is needed for the maintenance of a good general market, namely, a population which knows how to turn all the good things the market supplies to good account. This is found unfailingly in a community whose foundations are laid in a class of small cultivators. It comes to them naturally, not only to raise whatever their land can be made to produce, but also to know how to make the best use of every good thing they can raise. They know in what ways a chicken may be cooked, as well as how to make a broth of bread and herbs. Haricots and onions are with them of great account. A cabbage is a precious gift of kindly nature. Apples and plums can be dried and stored away for future use. All this, and a great deal more of the same kind, is traditional lore in the peasant proprietor's home. And as this class is the foundation on which rural society entirely, and in a great measure by immigration and kindred town society also rests, the lore of the peasant proprietor's home is thus spread throughout the whole community. The knowledge how to turn to good account the many commodities of the market cannot die out among the townsfolk. This is what supplies the market with the other requisite for its existence—its purchasers.

Both requisites have failed us, and that is the reason why amongst us general markets are dwindling to nothing, or have already in many places utterly died away. Market-day with us now means in the main a day for the sale of cattle and corn. We can have no good general markets in our towns, large as they are, because the peasant proprietors of the neighbourhood have been extinguished. To find these natural producers of vegetables, fruit, poultry, eggs, and butter, we must now go beyond the sea. Those who are now supplying a large part of our consumption of these articles, produce them for us on their little freeholds in Holland and Normandy. And what they produce for us comes to us in shiploads, and goes straight into the hands of shopkeepers-the second stage of middle-dealing between us and the original producers. Our own land is now pretty nearly all in large farms, which grow for us only bread and meat, and some portion of our potatoes. And then, together with this diminution and fast approaching extinction of the production of various minor articles has come, as might have been expected, a very general decay of the knowledge of how to turn them to account. Our people, both in town and country, are now brought up in the tradition that the only human food is bread and meat. An incidental consequence of this is that, instead of every one being born a cook, we have no cooks at all. No one knows naturally, and very few will ever learn by our

domestic service, or by our attempted cooking classes, how to turn anything to account. Hence, even as respects our corn and meat, the former supplemented with much of the best the world produces, and the latter in itself the best in the world, we can do less with them than any other people on earth. Our bread is hard, tough, twopound cubes, faultless if of statute weight, repulsive to the eye, unpleasing to the palate, and bad for the stomach; and we have no idea of cooking meat, except by roasting, or boiling, or baking large lumps, which with pride we call joints, the wastefulness of which astonishes, and the grossness of which horrifies, all other people.

That the inhabitants of the Channel Islands appreciate highly vegetables, and poultry, and dairy produce, because this is the best of what they have to live upon, and that they would be glad to exchange these small matters for our generous supplies of meat, cannot be alleged. In the meat market of St. Peter's Port, which is alongside the vegetable market, are thirty-six well-supplied butchers' shops: a large number for so small a place. The contiguous fish market, too, contains forty fishwives' marble stalls, on which one morning, last September, I counted twenty-two species of fish and

crustacea.

Another and most satisfactory indication of the well-founded prosperity of these Islands is that, notwithstanding the density of their population, they are but very slightly afflicted with the plague of pauperism. In close connection with this economically healthy condition is the fact, that they have not found themselves under the necessity of protecting their persons and property by a police force, although the lower requirements of labour in the Islands are largely supplied by immigration from Ireland, England, and France. I suppose this extraneous element of their population, as the phrase goes in the United States, with respect to a like element there, "works itself sweet" when it comes into contact with free and accessible land. A cottage—a far more substantial, roomier, and better-provided dwelling than that word suggests the idea of to our English minds— which I accidentally entered in one of my rambles in Jersey, I found belonged to an Irishman, who had also become the owner of three COWS. Where all may hope, and this cannot be unless the land be accessible to all, industry and thrift will be general, and they go a long way towards preventing pauperism, and diminishing crime, which is, in many cases, the direct result of hereditary hopeless poverty.

The wealth that has been accumulated in the Islands-notwithstanding, perhaps in consequence of, the wide diffusion of landed property that obtains throughout them-will surprise even those who are familiar with the accumulations of capital in this country; the difference being