grounded in the soil itself we say nothing, because there are at present no means by which the change from the prevailing system could be effected; but it seems evident, that if our colonies and the States continue to present advantages which cannot be obtained at home, and if our people come to regard emigration, not as a matter of necessity,—not as a change which the indigent are obliged to make for the sake of the necessaries of life,—but as an attractive removal to another sphere, in which they can employ their labour much more satisfactorily than in their native country,—then we must anticipate that a larger and larger portion of our best labourers will seek to establish an independent existence elsewhere, and leave to Britain only the inferior remnants of a class that has fought her battles, cultivated her fields, manned her ships, worked in her manufactories, peopled her colonies, and brought her, ungrateful as she is, up to the highest pitch of power. To those patriotic gentlemen who are about to improve the dwellings of our rural population we particularly recommend the experiment of attaching at least to some of the cottages as much land as would keep a cow, with a rood or two of croft, that would enable the cottar to instruct his children in spade husbandry, and to teach them regular and constant habits of industry from their earliest years. Let those gentlemen read in the "Quarterly Review" for July 1829, how Thomas Rook did his hired work regularly, and yet made £30 a-year out of a little bit of land; and how Richard Thomson kept two pigs and a Scotch cow on an acre and a quarter, worth, when he got it, five shillings per acre of rent; and how the widow at Hasketon brought up her fourteen children, and saved them from the degradation of the parish, by being allowed to retain as much land as kept her two cows; and, above all, let them remark how poor-rates and degradation have always followed the severance of the peasantry from the soil. If they wish to improve

the people as well as the dwellings, let them lay these things to heart, and let them be assured that the first thing to improve the labouring man is to hold out to him the prospect of an independent position, which he may hope to attain by prudence, economy, and honest labour.-June 24, 1854.

THE FRANCHISE.

Library. Of Californis

"It

ONE of the most remarkable sayings of which the discussion
in Parliament on the Reform Bill proved the occasion was
that of Lord Jeffrey, then Lord Advocate for Scotland.
was a measure," he said, "that would separate the waters
above the firmament from the waters below." The remark
embodied both a striking figure and a solid truth,—a figure
which, by appealing to the imagination, has sunk deeper into
the memory of the country than any other produced at the
time; and a truth which recent events have served peculiarly
to substantiate and elucidate. It was in consequence of this
separation of the waters that, while the revolutionary hurri-
cane raged wide upon the Continent, dashing into one wild
weltering ocean of anarchy and confusion the dense and pon-
derous masses, whose inherent strength no such measure had
divided into antagonistic, self-balancing forces, Britain escaped"
at least all the more terrible consequences of the storm.
is doubtful, however, whether we are permanently to escape.
We are told by men of science that, save for that continuous
belt of ocean which girdles the globe in the southern hemi-
sphere, we of the northern regions would have scarce any
tides. In the equatorial and arctic oceans, the rise of the
sea, in obedience to the attractive impulsions of the sun and
moon, is checked by the great continents that stretch from

It

north to south, before the tidal wave becomes in the least considerable; but in the southern belt that wave rolls round the world without break or interruption, and then, travelling northwards laterally, in obedience to the law through which water always seeks its level, it rises and falls twice every twenty-four hours on the most northern shores of Europe, Asia, and America. It has been thus with the tidal wave of revolution. The Reform Bill in this country stretched abreast of the privileged classes like a vast continent, and would have effectually checked every rising tide of revolution that originated in the country itself. But there lay in the neighbouring States great unbroken belts of the popular ocean, in which the revolutionary wave has risen high. The popular privileges have been elevated, in consequence, in these States, considerably above the British level; and it is very questionable whether this country will be long able to preserve its lower surface-line unaltered, when the flood is toppling at a higher line all around it. It would be at least well to be prepared for a steady setting in of the flood-tide on our shores; it would be wise to return to the figure of Lord Jeffrey-to be casting about for some second firmament, through which a farther modicum of bulk and volume might be subtracted from the waters below, and added to the waters above.

But does there exist, we ask, a portion of these lower waters that might be so separated with safety? We think there does. The bona fide property qualification we have ever regarded as peculiarly valuable,-greatly more so than the mere tenant qualification. The man who inhabits as tenant a house for which he pays a yearly rental of ten pounds, may be in many cases a man as well hafted in society, and possessed of as considerable a stake in the stability of the country and the maintenance of its institutions, as the proprietor to whom the ten pounds are paid. But the

class are by no means so safe on the average.

Their stake, as a

body, is considerably less; they are a greatly more fluctuating portion of the population, and more unsteady and unbalanced in their views and opinions. There is really no comparison between the man who, in some of the close alleys of a city like Edinburgh, opens a spirit-cellar on speculation, for which he pays a yearly rent of ten pounds, and the man who, after steadily adding pound to pound during the course of half a lifetime, at length invests his little capital in a house that brings him in ten pounds per annum, or, if he be his own tenant, that saves him that sum. The ten-pound tenants and the ten-pound proprietors compose, in the aggregate, bodies of men of an essentially different status and standing; and we hold that along the scale of proprietorship the franchise might safely descend a very considerable way indeed ere it corresponded with the existing level, if we may so express ourselves, on the tenant scale. We hold that the proprietor who possessed a house valued at five yearly pounds, would be on a higher, not a lower level, than the tenant who merely occupied a house valued at ten yearly pounds. His stake in the stability of the national institutions would be greater; and it might be rationally premised regarding him, if the house had been purchased out of his savings, or if, being derived to him by inheritance, he continued to preserve it unsquandered, that he was a steadier and safer man than the mere ten-pound tenant, of whom it could only be premised that present circumstances had enabled him, or hopes of future advantage had induced him, to inhabit a dwelling of a certain value. Nay, we are by no means sure whether there be not a principle in human nature through which a descent along the scale of proprietorship very considerably beneath the five yearly pounds might be rendered safe. have ever found men valuing the property which they pos

We

sessed, especially if of their own earning, not by an absolute,

but by a comparative standard,-not by its price in pounds sterling, but with reference to their own circumstances and condition, and to the efforts which the acquirement of it had cost them.

We

We have seen working men quite as proud of the little house, consisting of a but and a ben, a trap-stair and a loft, which the painful labour of years had secured to them, as the merchant on the little estate of some three or four hundred acres, in which he had invested the savings of a lifetime, or the master-builder or contractor of the half street or square of which his profession, long and successfully pursued, had enabled him to become the owner. therefore do not attempt fixing the line to which, in this special direction, the franchise might be safely permitted to descend; but we do think it is a direction in which it might descend very safely; and though in our larger cities, such as Edinburgh and Glasgow, its descent would have scarce any effect in extending that basis on which the representation of the country rests, and which to a certainty must by and by be widened and enlarged, we are mistaken if in the smaller towns it would not considerably more than double its area. It would broaden the base of the social pyramid, and enable it to resist, without the danger of overthrow, the coming tempest which is so visibly darkening the heavens.

Is there any other portion of the "waters beneath the firmament" that might be separated from the general mass, and made to balance against it, somewhat in the manner in which the tidal wave that enters through the Bristol Channel from the south balances and counteracts the tidal wave which enters the German Sea from the north, and in some parts of the coast, as at Great Yarmouth and the Hague, reduces, by fully one-half, the average rise and fall of the tide? We would answer this query much more hesitatingly and doubtfully than the other. We, however, do not see on what principle it is that, while the tenants of houses of ten