emigrants would have died of starvation as soon as they had reached their destination. Their history is indeed a sad narrative of ignorance and blundering, causing anxieties and sufferings which have only, in a proportion of instances, ended in success. The ignorance of the resources of emigration fields, and the services there required the ignorance, in short, of how they are to live-in which people cast their destinies on the other side of the world, is astounding. It is, perhaps, seldom that a young woman, departing for Australia, takes even so thoughtful a view of her future lot as one we once heard of, who, after her trunk was packed and all ready, remembered how at school she had seen

that the globe was round, with the southern hemisphere on the opposite side from the northern, and reflected that in her new home her position would be inverted-a condition so inconsistent with the decorum in which she had been trained, that no persuasion would induce her to submit to it. The inducements which have taken many out have not had so much real knowledge at their foundation as this which made her stay at home. Often the restless dissipated artisan, to whom city life at home did not afford sufficient excitement, has found himself deposited on a boundless plain of arid grass, hundreds of miles from a town, and many miles even from the next station, where he has had to tend sheep and feed on tea and damper. The general notion with which artisans and other working-men have emigrated, has not been a specific understanding founded on inquiry, that they have qualifications which will bring them a better return in the colonies than at home. They have little more than a vague feeling of expansiveness-an idea that there is plenty to divide, and more room for them at the common table. An artisan, unless he is ambitiously bound for the gold dig gings, where he is to make a sudden fortune, has little notion of changing his pursuit, but rather, if he thinks at all about the matter, expects to find that it is more needed and better paid in the land of promise than at home. If he be a coach-varnisher,

or a bookbinder, or a picture-frame maker, he expects to have more coaches to varnish, or books to bind, or pictures to frame, than the overstocked trade at home can supply him with. A stone-mason from Forfarshire, emigrating with such views, was suffering much despondency from the unhappy prospect afforded by the flat mangrove shores of New South Wales, until he rounded in between the heights of Port Jackson, when he brightened up, and, turning to a fellow-pilgrim, said, "Man, this maun be a capital country for stane efter a'."

Thus

This feature of emigration has exhibited on a broad scale the way in which our working people drift rather than steer themselves into their position as members of the productive community. A rumour of the making of some new railway, or the establishment of some new manufactory, penetrates into Dorsetshire or far Tipperary, and a gradual stream sets in the direction of the additional labour field-a stream of beings acting under a sort of epidemic impulse, and scarcely more conscious of the specific object of their journey than a drove of Highland cattle. the mass of labouring hands sway this way and that way through the land, as large openings for work occur here and there. But the individual members of these gregarious masses might, if they possessed a little thought or knowledge, each find out for himself some place and some pursuit which shall be, in comparison with others, the best suited for his faculties, and far more advantageous, probably, than that to which some vague inarticulate rumour draws him. In short, what we desiderate is, that the workman should have knowledge enough to be able to take a proper estimate of the value of his work in the great market of the world, and sell it for nothing less than its value. If he is to be, like inert matter, at the disposal of the capitalist, he will be taken and cast off as it may suit his employer's interest, not his own; and if the work he has come to is soon finished, or is found impossible, or if any other change is made, he may find himself left high and dry in all his

natural helplessness, until he drifts unconsciously with some other lab

our current.

Whoever has been told the sensations of a respectable mechanic-the head of a family-on the first day on which he has found himself out of work for a permanency, has got a glimpse of one of the most painful ordeals which the poor human heart has to endure, even in this world of troubles. It is an ordeal from which increased intelligence would rescue thousands. When great revulsions in trade come, there will be widespread suffering, no doubt; but among the sufferers of all ranks, the active and intelligent set about righting themselves, and in doing so they go far to redeem the general calamity of which they are victims. But it is from mere local and incidental shiftings in occupation, which have no effect on the working classes as a body, that the greatest aggregate amount of suffering is caused to them. The shifting influence of machinery is its chief source. Take some uniform occupation, like spinning, weaving, or nail-making: machine is invented to do the work, and the hands employed in the department are thrown out of it, while among the rest of the working classes there is abundant work and good pay. What too often happens is, that the people, whom machinery thus sweeps past, exhaust themselves in frantic efforts to keep up with the tireless monster, and sooner or later sink in apathy, sullenly ruminating on the injustice of which they are the victims, and maintaining that the pursuit of their own trade, in which they have been trained, is a vested right, which cannot, without an outrage on all justice, be taken from them.

a

Few things are more solemnly touching than a body of men willing to do work, but unable to obtain any-at least any which, according to their own notions, they are able to do. It may seem harsh to say it, yet, on consideration of the case, it will be found that there is no more unreasonable demand which man can make on his fellow than the demand to supply him with the special kind of work which he is able or which he chooses to do. Grant, for instance,

that all the property in the country is in pledge for the support of destitution, and that no one inhabitant of the land shall be permitted to starve while another possesses that wherewith life can be saved-it is far more reasonable to demand our hard cash on this principle than to insist on receiving it as the wages of labour. The insisting on having it in this shape of course predicates that the labour is not profitable, otherwise there would be no necessity for the coercive rule. To say, then, that the men who possess the capital available for the purpose, shall be bound to keep up unprofitable concerns, is not only requiring them to part with their money, but is a sort of condemnation to slavery, in the form of a life of anxiety and labour, for which there is no reward. When the splitting roller was invented, to have required that the dealers should continue to employ hand nail-makers at a loss to themselves, would have been not merely requiring them to part with so much money daily, but to undergo all the exertion and anxiety of a merchant's businessand these are often not light-for the purpose of giving away this money in a proper manner. It were well if the working classes, who take generally a fair estimate of things when they have a fair medium of knowledge to see them through, had the means of perceiving the gross injustice of all such demands.

Besides the old staple mechanical trades and the working of machinery, there are here and there in the recesses of our vast productive organisation a much greater number of specialities requiring a peculiar skill, or "knack," as it is aptly termed in Scotland-for it is generally confined to one movement, which is learned more by habit than exertion. Such a faculty sometimes becomes a temporary monopoly; and an absolute reliance on its continuing to be so, may turn out one of the most seductive delusions of the workman. These specialities are often closely allied to machinery; they abound in button-making, struck work, and other branches of hardware manufacture; and they generally consist in preparation of the material for the machine

or in doing something to it between the operations of the machine, which mechanical ingenuity has not yet found out a way of doing without human fingers-filling, as it were, with hand-work, a blank in machinework which wheels and springs have not as yet, but shortly will, fill up. In the great ironworks there are, between the roasting of the ore and the shaping in the mill, several of these specialities; and conspicuous among them is that of the puddler, who, in his own fierce little furnace, twists the crystalline metal molten in the blast-furnace until it becomes sinewy malleable iron. These functions, however, besides their peculiar adroitness, exact a degree of attention, strength, and endurance which must always keep them at a high rate of pay. The workman may always calculate, however though he hardly ever does so-that if he be getting a good income for small services by the possession of some easily-acquired dexterity of movement, competition or machinery will some day snatch his monopoly from him. Among the occupations of this kind which have long been so extensive as to be a sort of staple trade, are the heckling of flax, and velvet-cutting, or the operation of cutting with a small knife those minute loops in the woven fabric, the severed ends of which, then sticking forth from the web, constitute the pile of the velvet. In both occupations desperate attempts were always made by combinations and strikes to preserve a monopoly, but in vain-the really easy acquisition of the necessary dexterity bring ing down the occupation through competition to the level of low wages. Almost every new device in our ornamental manufactures generally gives a monopoly and high wages to those who first learn to practise it; but the golden harvest is soon over. We remember once, in a hot room of a leather-manufactory, seeing a dusky, half-naked being occupied in laying on a fine japanned surface, which could only be finished by a peculiar turn of the hand. The man had been taken from London to a distant province, and was employed at about a pound a-day. The moral of his position, however, lay in another apart

ment in the same establishment, where a few boys were learning the peculiar art, their teachers having in fact employed the adept, not so much for the sake of his work, as of observing how he did it.

A consciousness of the exceeding feebleness of the working classes in adjusting for themselves those transactions in which their own material interests are concerned, is betrayed in the nomenclature which all schools of political economy have bestowed on them and on their services. We are told of "the labour market,"-the market in which labour is bought and sold. Now, no doubt, the produce of labour

of a given amount of work, may strictly be so estimated in money, and bought and sold; and when labour has always a fixed extent, and, consequently, a fixed produce, it may be estimated, and bought and sold; but labour in the abstract-the amount of labour which any man or set of men can accomplish in the full exercise of their faculties-is indefinite and inappreciable, and cannot form, like a chattel, a value in exchange. Look at the same thing in another shape. The working classes are told, not much to their content, that when labour is abundant in comparison with capital, their wages will be low; but when, on the other hand, capital is abundant and labour scarce, their wages will be high. It is not wonderful that the working people, especially in the existing state of their knowledge of their own interests, should recoil with horror at a doctrine which seems to place their fate so absolutely at the disposal of wealth, and so utterly to strip them of every legitimate capacity for shaping their own destinies. The man who is merely an element in the general material mass called labour,who may to-day be an item of labour scarce and well paid, and to-morrow may be an integral part of labour superfluous, whether as a surplus and actually discarded hand, or as one still precariously provided forwhere is such a man to find inducements to rise up early and late, take rest and eat the bread of carefulness? What is it to him to be sober and frugal and prudent? He is in

it has alighted on humble employers, who have risen by sagacity and frugality from their own grade, or on the consumers of the commodity they manufacture, who are almost entirely of the working classes.

The lessons so taught contain, no doubt, much good sense, and it is highly desirable that the working people in general should be better acquainted than they are with the larger and practically established truths of political economy. But the want of a knowledge coming closer to their own personal interests, has disabled them from reaching the border of those more general and abstract truths, and the day of their calamity and misery is by no means a good opportunity for inculcating it, even were they intellectually in a position to receive and acknowledge an abstract proposition of which they have ever before been denying the truth. It is the character of all those sciences and branches of knowledge which personally relate to man himself, and the elements of his happiness or misery, that they are least capable of appreciation, in all their symmetry and truth, by those who are at the moment suffering specimens of these qualities. The bankrupt merchant who, in the midst of his own desolation, looks out for an abject clerkship, and meets his accomplished daughters returning from vain errands to sell sketches or procure pupils, is not ready to acknowledge that the Act of Parliament which brought him to the Gazette, is fraught with incalculable advantages to the commercial prosperity of the country at large. The tourist picked up after a collision, with a compound fracture, and certain undiscoverable internal injuries, is not easily reconciled to his position by the information that the Registrar-General's returns show the accidents on railways to be, comparatively to the number of travellers, a considerable per-centage less than those from other classes of vehicles, including carts and waggons; nor by a formula which shows that the accidents on the railway whence he has just suffered, are in reality some figure of five decimals less than the average of accidents on all the railways of the kingdom, taken

collectively. He is even scarcely more contented with his lot, when he is told that the critical operation it is thought expedient to subject him to, is one of a character for which surgical science has long been on the watch, impatient of so favourable an opportunity of testing its efficiency, and that, whether the results be favourable or fatal, the consequence to the world must be highly valuable, by finally settling a difficulty in the healing art. None of us like to be the corpus vile on which the experimentum is made, and the ordeal by no means tends to awaken us to a sense of the valuable consequences to the world. It is our nature, and we cannot help it.

"What is it to him who reaps no harvest in his early joys, Though the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's?"

It is, in fact, from the very want of that knowledge, which must be to each of them his own personal introduction to the wider knowledge of the laws of trade and industry, that the social victim of the union or the strike has suffered. When he shall have become successful and comfortable, in virtue of that humbler personal knowledge which enables him to make the best of his strength and abilities, he will then be better fitted to learn the wider laws which rule his destinies, and to profit by the wisdom they contain. A hint to change ground, and take up another trade, in conformity with the laws of political economy, will receive a more healthy consideration than a hint to starve in order that the unvarying rigidity of these laws may be illustrated. There are very few indeed among us who have philosophy enough to admire the beauty and the justice of a general law, which promises to ourselves nothing but suffering for having neglected, or been unable to see it. Stories are told of gravediggers lamenting over the evil times that have followed on the establishment of improved drainage, and sighing over the good old days when business was rife, and the many deaths made the place worth living in. Instances there are, we are told, of jailors under deep depression concerning the alarming and