drawbacks, family pride requires that the family of Acres shall still be known as Acres of Clod Hall. The loss of dignity which would result from severance from those rushy, ill-drained, bankrupt acres, is worse than all the pinching and anxiety that are endured with their possession. And this nourishment of family pride at the expense of family feeling and of the welfare of the country, becomes a sort of religion which is inculcated upon all the children, whether the one happy eldest born, who is to transmit the family glory undimmed, or the younger ones to whom is reserved the less pleasant duty of self-sacrifice. Fortunately

at the present day the younger sons have taken more boldly to various trades and professions, and we have comparatively few of those undesirable characters which figure in the plays and novels of the last century, such as the Squire's younger brother who hung about the hall, and in return for his board and lodging discharged the duties of a superior gamekeeper. The family living still often provides for one son, who, nolens volens, must profess a divine call to accept the position of rector with some hundreds a year. But official patronage and maintenance at the expense of the State being gone, except for the few who are highly connected, most of the younger sons of the gentry set out manfully to fight their way in life. But how does the system work on the daughters? We are astonished at the willingness of widows in India to burn in obedience to custom, but England is full of starving spinsters who have lost the chance of happy homes, because the glory of the family demanded that the money which might have enabled them to marry, should be retained to enable the son and heir to keep up his position in the country. And these faded women, many of them, do not repine. They treasure the memory of some old romance, the novel of their life, of which the third volume has been suppressed, but console themselves for the loss by feeding their family pride and keeping up a chill gentility, which would be ludicrous if it were not pathetic.

The welfare of the country demands that land should be freely bought and sold. Fully one half of the land is strictly tied up in settlement, so that it is not in the market. The tradition of family pride and social importance, which are coupled with the ownership of land, help to keep it out. When property in land no longer confers an advantage in local government there will not be the same inducement to amass great properties; land will be held by rich men in such portions as are necessary for enjoyment, not for domination or vainglory. In such a case there would gradually be few estates in the cultivated parts of the country of more than a thousand acres, and this would not work any social oppression, especially if we had better and larger units of rural self-government than the township or small parish. With a unit of self-government such as the poor

law union, and with a unit for election of representatives of not less than 1,000 inhabitants, much of the political importance of the ownership of the land of a parish would disappear, and economic considerations which tend to the distribution of land would come into play. It is desirable that even in rural districts land may be so distributed that the competition of landowners may come into play, and that in no district any one man should have a veto on the existence of places of worship or of schools. It is further desirable that land should be held by solvent people, who can improve it and do justice to it, instead of the present state of things, where many a bankrupt and broken-down family clings to a property that belongs far more to the mortgagees than to them.

It is desirable that there should be greater power for the acquisition of small freeholds, that in our villages, mechanics and others who are industrious should be able to acquire the independence resulting from the ownership of the houses in which they dwell. It is the precarious tenure of their homes, which to a great extent puts the poorer classes in the country at the mercy of the upper class.

Valuable as the old yeomanry cultivating their own land was, and much as it is to be regretted that such a class should have passed away or nearly so, it is not easy to look for the founding anew of such a class. Improved methods of agriculture, the demand for more capital per acre in the cultivation of land, the tendency to make farming a skilled and scientific occupation, and the growth of large farms, are all against a revival of the old class of yeomanry. But we may give our tenant farmers many of the characteristics of that class. Security for their capital by some reasonable tenant right, compensation for improvements, protection from the ravages of game, association in the government of the county, education for their children in reformed grammar schools, all these things will give them strength, dignity, and security, and will raise their status, and create in them some of that outspoken independence which was the boast and pride of our old yeomanry. If at the same time by the proper use of our waste lands and public lands, facilities are given to the labourers to advance their position, either by allotments or by co-operative farming, and if our rural elementary schools are made truly national and efficient, and if a proper self-governing organization be given to rural England, we may see a peaceful revolution for the better which will work wonders. As relates to the distribution of land, a few changes in the law would probably do much.

1. The separation of county administration from the ownership of land, the basing it on an elective ground, and the readjustment and extension of areas for local government.

2. The assimilation in all respects of real to personal property. 3. The prohibition of settlements of land on unborn persons, and

the incorporation of a power of sale in all settlements without requiring any consents.

4. The extension of the powers of compulsory purchase of land for many public objects.

5. The abolition of the game laws, or at least their very great restriction.

Of all the questions which demand the attention of Liberal politicians, there is none that cries more loudly for settlement than this one of the relation of the people of England to the land of England. The connection between Church and State interests a more active group of reformers, and is, therefore, discussed more frequently, but it is not in more urgent, nor in as urgent, need of reform.

Though the land laws of this country hamper its social development, though they inflict a grievous tax upon the whole nation for the benefit of a small class, though they have degraded the poor of the country, and stunted the health of our town population; yet in spite of all this, apart from some speculative Radicals of the upper or middle class, few reformers outside of the working-class leaders have sought to expose their injustice, and to bring about a remedy. Many times have Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright sought to direct attention to this matter, as one which would, if thoroughly dealt with, produce a greater harvest of good to the country than even the repeal of the corn laws; but their call has met with no response. When Mr. Mill founded the Land Tenure Reform Association, his own name and personal eminence supported it for a time; but even during his lifetime few subscribers came forward, and after his death the society collapsed.

Nevertheless, though in the present age of feverish accumulation of wealth, of craving for social distinction, of somewhat easier transition than formerly from the middle to the upper class, the temptation is very great to our successful men of business to ally themselves with the system which maintains the social supremacy of large landowners, and though consequently the natural leaders of the movement for land reform fail us, yet we cannot doubt that as education spreads among the poor, as municipal and representative institutions are extended and strengthened, we shall make the land laws of England one of the practical questions for politicians, instead of a speculative theme for economists.

E. LYULPH STANLEY.

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS IN AMERICA.

It is a humiliating reflection that the Anglo-Saxon race are unable to subsist through a whole generation without two or three times breaking into a commercial and financial stampede, in which, figuratively speaking, hundreds of thousands of people are trampled to death, or left bruised and bleeding by the way side. These disgraceful routs have latterly assumed something of the regularity of clock-work, so that people pretend to know when to expect one by looking in the almanac. 1816, 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857, 1866, 1873, each of these years has ushered in its holocaust of English victims, and the alternate periods have included America as well, so that business men take into their calculations a panic on one side of the water every ten years, and on the other side every twenty. But, notwithstanding the apparent regularity of the visitation, very few men engaged in trade escape, when the clock strikes the dreadful hour. The appearance of prosperity immediately preceding the panic is so deceitful, the activity of trade and the upward movement of prices are so exhilarating, that the tornado always finds us with every inch of canvas spread, all the ports open, and the crew fast asleep. It is impossible to exaggerate the suffering caused by these financial storms, whose vengeance always falls with greatest severity upon those least responsible for them, and least able to resist them, -the labouring poor. No one can read the story of England's poor immediately following the commercial crises of 1816 and 1825 without a shudder. Nor were those of America, after the crises of 1837 and 1857, any better provided for, except as nature had dealt rather more kindly by them. All that man could do had been done to turn them shelterless and penniless into the street, to become beggars or barbarians, like the Sunderland sailors, the Norwich weavers, and the Bradford wool-combers of the mother-country. Few persons are aware how great an obstacle to human progress these oft-recurring shocks to industry really are. We see great

houses go down with a crash, but others come to take their places. We see multitudes of operatives thrown out of employment, and soup kitchens established, and charities set on foot, to carry them through the weary time of revulsion. What is not seen is the progress they might make if their savings were not swept away every few years through no fault of their own.

The people of the United States are now toiling through one of these periodical crises. During the past three years there have been mercantile failures with liabilities reaching nearly $650,000,000. Multitudes of persons have been plunged from affluence into poverty.

Greater multitudes have been thrown out of employment altogether. Riotous demonstrations have taken place among the cotton operatives at Fall River, in the coal regions of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, but happily without bloodshed. The New England States are pinched almost to the extremity of endurance, and the iron industry is prostrated as it has never before been in the lifetime of the writer. The West has suffered less than any other section, but the whole country is in a sad state of trouble, and is asking, When will these hard times pass away?

The phenomena antecedent to the crisis were the usual ones—a rise of prices, great prosperity, large profits, high wages and strikes for higher, crowded thoroughfares, large importations, a railway mania, expanded credits, over-trading, over-building, and high living. On the 17th of September, 1873, the New York and Oswego Midland Railway Company failed, and there was a tremor in the stock market. On the 18th the banking house of Jay Cooke and Co. closed its doors, and the depression in stocks became a panic. Prices of the leading railway and miscellaneous shares fell from 1 to 10 per cent. The usual soothing statements were put forth that the suspension would be only temporary, but the public believed otherwise. This firm had been long engaged in promoting the most hazardous and premature railway enterprise of the age, viz., the Northern Pacific, and had made advances of its own and its depositors' money to the amount of several millions. Its position was identical with that of the financial companies that collapsed in London in 1866—its capital and deposits having been lost in bad speculations. On the 19th the firm of Fisk and Hatch succumbed, together with eighteen other private banking and brokerage houses, in New York. Messrs. Fisk and Hatch had been "carrying" the Chesapeake and Ohio railway in much the same way that Cooke and Co. had been carrying the Northern Pacific, but they possessed the confidence of business men in a higher degree. There were eight failures in Philadelphia on the same day, and a "run" was commenced on the Union Trust Company of New York, one of the largest monetary establishments in the city. On the 20th the Union Trust Company closed its doors, with liabilities amounting to $6,000,000, and it became speedily known that its secretary was a defaulter to the amount of $128,000, and that an outside person had been allowed to make an overdraft of $200,000 more. Subsequent investigation showed that the Union Trust Company was full of dead --men's bones. Panic terror now seized Wall Street. Western Union Telegraph shares, the leading fancy in the market then, as now, fell from 901 (the price it commanded four days earlier) to 554, and New York Central Railway, the pièce de résistance of the Stock Exchange, from 100 to 89. The Bank of the Commonwealth and the National