ation; but with newspapers and periodicals now circulating in the Chinese language, and well supported by native readers, the process of conversion and education must go on, and each day will add something to an impetus already given. Let us hope that it may ultimately take a pacific, and not a purely belligerent, direction. depends not a little upon the Western Powers themselves, and their repre

It

sentatives, political and commercial, in China and Japan, whether the result shall be the development of mutual interests and goodwill-or the more or less rapid adoption of all the material elements of our strength and civilization, only to be turned against Western nations and enable the Chinese to fight them with their own weapons.

RUTHERFORD ALCOCK.

In one of my addresses at Cheshunt College, I remarked that " a very distinguished and excellent statesman had laid it down most strongly that it is absolutely incompatible with the idea of a Church to receive any appointment or influence from the hands of any one except the members of that Church. Here again," I added, "the Countess of Huntingdon comes to my assistance, because, by the constitution of Cheshunt College, her trustees, who are certainly not all of them members of the Church of England, are to bestow, at any rate in one instance, the patronage of the Church of England." It has been represented to me that in this passage I have done injustice to the eminent statesman to whom I referred. passage which was chiefly in my mind when I spoke, was the Duke of Argyll's second speech, June 9, 1874:-"It is fatal not merely to a Church, but to any society, to introduce into it and confer powers of government upon those who do not belong to it, and who do not desire to belong to it." (P. 28)

The

It would appear, however, from the Duke's first speech, that this observation was intended to apply (not to "all powers of government" but) only to elections of ministers; and (not to "all who do not belong, or who do not desire to belong to it," but) only to "those who are its

1 Macmillan's Magazine for August 1874.

This is best

avowed enemies." (P. 5.) seen in a passage on p. 18: "To allow in a Church a liberty exercised by the members of hostile communions would be to introduce absolute confusion, incompatible with the very existence of any organized and constituted societywould deprive it of all terms of membership, and would allow the highest functions of the body to be exercised by those who not only do not belong to it, but who tell you that they never will belong to it, and that they desire its destruction."

According to the view which I urged in the address, and which I illustrated by the particular instance of the patronage exercised by the trustees of Cheshunt College, I think that it would in practice be difficult to define what bodies or individuals external to a Church would be regarded by it as "hostile," or "avowed enemies," and what would be regarded as simply "not belonging to it." Still, it is a distinction which ought not to have been overlooked. And I am rejoiced to find (with this reservation) that the views of the distinguished statesman which I ventured to criticise were not in this instance so far apart as I had feared from those which I had presumed to express; and which are, I would fain hope, not at variance with the general principles of which he has from time to time been the able exponent.

A. P. S.

MODERN trades-unionism has not yet existed long enough to enable any one to state even approximately what the ultimate outcome of its enormous power may be. That it has done much good upon the whole to the workmen is now pretty generally admitted; but the good is by no means unmixed, and the wars which workmen not unfrequently wage against economic laws, and the natural consequences of trade fluctuations, threaten sometimes to be productive of serious disaster to the country. Of late, indeed, it has seemed to many, that unless trades-unionism could develop into a higher order of brotherhood and co-operation, it would tend more and more to become a war against the natural results of competitive free trade rather than against the undue influence of capital. The point is worth discussion, but at present I am desirous rather of dealing with the new phase of unionism, which the banding together of the agricultural labourers of England has brought to the front.1

It must have been evident to many people from the first that a trades-union of labouring men, scattered over England, in small villages-of men who were very poor, very ignorant, and without many means of communicating with each other-presented a whole host of difficulties which artisans and workmen in towns and manufacturing centres have never had to face. These difficulties were of themselves sufficient, one would have thought, to have rendered any conception of the kind abortive from the first; and I cannot but suspect that had the world been otherwise very busy at the time of the Welles

1 For an admirable statement of the limits to trades-unionism as a beneficent force, see Professor Cairnes's new work: "Some Leading Principles of Political Economy Newly Expounded," part ii. chapter iii.

bourne rising, the new-born agricultural union would, on these grounds alone, have had but a short shrift. If we had been at war, or if there had been great measures before Parliament stirring the minds of the people and keeping them awake, the strike in the Warwickshire village would have died miserably, as many a similar strike before has done. For this was not by any means the first uprising of labourers in England. Leaving Wat Tyler and Jack Cade out of sight, in modern days, and within men's memory, there have been agitations and movements here and there in England, notably at the time of the rage after the allotment panacea forty years or so ago; men have risen here and there wildly, and demonstrated that without more means they could not live, and then, no redress being visible, have succumbed, and gone "quietly back to their work."

Nor were the labourers themselves by any means the first to face the problems besetting their condition. For years Canon Girdlestone has been ably and quietly endeavouring, in these columns and elsewhere, against not a little opposition, to carry out that policy to which the unions have been driven from almost the moment of their existence, and by a judicious application of the migration lever he has done not a little to raise the position of the men in his neighbourhood. In many respects what he has done laid down the lines for action when the day came for the men to endeavour to take up the work for themselves on a large scale. His work, however, and all these stray sputterings of discontent, passed almost unnoticed by the world at large.

But the Wellesbourne labourers chose an opportune moment; England was then

2 See "The National Agricultural Labourers Union." Macmillan's Magazine for September 1873.

void of an excitement, and men's minds were open to look at this new wonder. The trader on notoriety-be he newspaper correspondent or earnest philanthropist often does much good at such a time; he brings before the earnestly benevolent and freedom-loving much that they would not otherwise hear of, and he did good service to these poor people then. The labourers' union became a thing for all "advanced" persons to pet till it was in danger of being at one time coddled and belauded out of existence. Fortunately, perhaps, substantial support of another kind was accorded as well, and the working men thus got good rather than evil out of this notoriety. They were mostly sober, quiet people, and in no way inclined for revolution if they had their rights; therefore they throve, the principles of unionism spread until almost all mid-England and most of the south were embodied in two vast corporations, the Federal and the National Labourers' Unions.

As every one knows, both these bodies became involved in a struggle with the employers of labour in the Eastern Counties in March of the present year, a struggle which has been carried on by the farmers with great bitterness for five months, and which the labourers, backed by the sympathy and subscriptions of an urban and trading public, almost wholly on their side, have maintained with great patience and resolution, growing bitter only as harvest came and passed, leaving them still without the looked-for victory.1

In this strife the farmers have, from the first, been, on most points, clearly wrong. They locked out a few men to begin with, who struck work for an ad

1 Since the above was written the executive committee of the National Union have passed a resolution which may be taken as a virtual expression of defeat in the Eastern Counties. It is to the purport that the Union can henceforth only assist labourers to migrate or emigrate, and that those clecting to stay in the locked-out districts must look out for themselves. This, coupled with the fact that the

number on the pay-roll is reduced to one-half

by migration, emigration, and return to work, is a very significant fact.

-a space

vance of wages at a week's notice of time, be it remembered, identical with what a farmer is supposed to give to his men—and then, in order to stamp out this new pestilent dictator, proceeded to lock out all round hundreds of unionists as such, without having received any threat of strike or other provocation. They made a union themselves that they might destroy that of the labourers, and have almost uniformly treated attempts at compromise with abusive contempt. The farmers were wrong in this, and have continued wrong; but yet, in spite of all the money lavished upon the sustenance of the struggle by the men and their friends, the farmers may gain, if not the apparent victory, the substantial fruits of it.

It appears to me that those who ground hopes of permanent advantage to the agricultural labourer on tradesunionism as such are as likely to be deceived as the amiable and benevolent people who formerly thought that misery was to be averted from every rustic household by the allotment system; that a few roods or perches of land would keep the men from the parish. The powers which presented insuperable obstacles to the success of that scheme, hit the unions with tenfold force, and they are beset by others which threaten, as things go, to place the advantage of this battle in the long run always with the farmer. For one thing, as has been forcibly pointed out by Mr. Richard Jefferies, the labourer is being more and more met by the inroads of mechanical contrivances for doing his work, and these tend to lessen the demand for manual labour much more than they otherwise would, because the farming of England is, on the average, bad. I have wandered over many portions of it in recent years, and nothing has struck me more painfully than this fact. Great fields of rich soil everywhere lying in permsnent pasture, instead of taking their place in a profitable system of rotation crops; fields that are occasionally tilled lying fallow, others, under crops, choked with weeds. All round London any one can see hundreds of such, though

the country there might be tilled like a garden, at enormous profit. And as in the neighbourhood of London so else where. It is only here and there that what is rather grotesquely called "model farming" is to be found, and hence when we step from the exception to the rule, and find also that a prevalent notion that England should be a vast cattle pasture is more and more tending to throw land out of tillage, it becomes evident that any spread of the use of machinery helps to throw men disproportionately out of employment. Were it otherwise -did the machinery but prepare the way for the high tillage and minute care which rich land deserves, and will pay, or do the heavier work that needs to be done speedily, such as reaping, there would be work for more men rather than less, with every new advance towards its perfection. But rough, careless farm

1 The Times of August 1st contains an account of the farming of Mr. John Prout, of Blount's Farm, Herts, which is well worth studying, as showing what may be done with the land when a man is free to do with it as he likes. Mr. Prout bought the farm in 1861, and began systematically to apply the highest skill and the most powerful mechanical aids to cultivation in order to work up the clay soil of which it is composed to a high yielding power. The cultivation is almost exclusively grain, and consequently the same fields have been cropped for several years in succession with the same crop, and this the more that no portion of the land is ever left in summer fallow. Yet, so great is the yield, that at the recent sale of the standing crops-Mr. Prout does not harvest them himself the price given averaged 107. 17s. 7d. per acre for wheat. For the last seven years the average gross return

on the farm (450 acres) has been 4,6197., yield

ing a net revenue of 1,1347.-less sundry general expenses-to represent profit on farmer's capital and proprietor's return for permanent improvements and rent. Mr. Prout, of course, has to pay no rent, and if he had, it is probable that such a state of things would not have been seen; for without either proprietary or tenant right he could not possibly have ventured to invest his capital so freely. The outlay for manual labour on this farm, and on that of Mr. Middleditch, of Blunsdon, Wilts, similarly worked, is comparatively very small, but affords no test of the results that might be expected to follow high farming generally, for the heaviest part of the work is done by those who purchase the crops. The uniform cropping also of necessity

makes the labour less.

ing, which leaves the crops to come to maturity pretty much as they may when once they are in the ground; which pays no attention to weeds, to scientific manuring, to subsoil tillage, or to careful husbandry of any kind-can dispense with men in a great measure if a machine will roughly do the work. Hence this new agency from these old causes (which Mr. Jefferies does not mention), more than from any displacing power that machines really ought to have, is fighting against the labourer, instead of for him, making it difficult or impossible for him to hold his ground for long without either crowding into towns to stagnate, become pauperised, and die there, or fleeing out of the country.

And there is another and more abiding cause at work, against which Canon Girdlestone has had constantly to contend. Rural populations tend to stagnate. The love of a locality in which a man is born and brought up is naturally strong, and not the least so amongst the poor rustics. Family ties, too, hold firmer in, and movement is less facile between, country districts than from city to city, so that insensibly each village comes almost to have its own standard of wage, and nothing is more surprising than the varying rates of wages which often prevail in the same county at places within a few miles of each other. The enthusiasm of the union and the spread of education-rather a delusive thing the latter, I am afraid, with farmers for guardians and vestry, and the "third standard" of Lord Sandon-may help to counteract this tendency, but it is a strong one, and always works so as to neutralize attempts at uniformity and rule over wide areas. Connected with this, too, is the varying position of villages in different localities, through the individual action of proprietors of differing dispositions. One man is benevolent, and gives his labourers allotments at a liberal rent, while the proprietor of the next parish gives them nothing at all, but huddles them all into a close village, in pigsties sickening to think of. How is the union to deal with these varying conditions? Can it hope to deport the