similar essay two years ago. "Let the Free-Traders be of good cheer: they have done marvellous things. They have accomplished what no British statesman since the days of Alfred has been able to effect. They have stopped the growth of our population, and for the first time during five centuries rendered it retrograde." ." But the now as certained result has greatly outstripped what we then predicted-so much have the real effects of FreeTraders' measures gone beyond what the most gloomy imagination among the Protectionists could then anticipate. Irrespective of plague, pestilence, and famine, they have caused a chasm in five years in the Irish population of 1,800,000 souls, in the whole Empire of 900,000. They have sent, for the last three years, from 250,000 to 300,000 people yearly out of the country in search of that food of which they were deprived at home. They have with one blow swamped the Poor Law Amendment Act in England, rendered necessary a crushing rate in Ireland and Scotland, and made rates higher in England during two years of boasted prosperity, when measured in grain, their real standard, than they ever were before in the worst years of deplored misery. They have extended crime, during these two boasted years, to an extent never before known in the gloomiest periods of disaster. They have, on the admission of their ablest supporters, rendered agricultural industry unremunerative for two years and a half over the whole country. They have cut £9,000,000 annually off the income of trades and professions, £20,000,000 off the rent of land in Great Britain. They have destroyed all hope-as long as their system is continued-of reducing the debt; and have added 30 per cent to its weight by taking as much off the incomes of those by whom it is to be paid. They have extirpated in a few years 200,000 cultivators in Ireland. They have lowered, by their monetary system, railway property at least a half over the whole Empire, and cut

a moiety off its whole commercial wealth. They have rendered the nation dependent in three years for a fourth part of the entire food of the people on foreign states. They have compelled the Government, by the cheapening system, and consequent decline of the revenue which it is possible to extract from the people, to lower the national establishments so much, that the occurrence of disaster, on the first breaking out of hostilities, is a matter of certainty; and the maintenance of the national independence, if the present system is continued for any length of time, has become impossible. They have destroyed £100,000,000 worth of property in the West Indies. They have sown the seeds of separation by severing the bond of protection in Canada, and diffused such discontent through the other colonies, that, in despair of preserving, they are preparing to abandon them. They have repealed the Navigation Laws, and caused twothirds of the annual increment of the shipping employed in carrying on our trade, to pass into the hands of our enemies. The Peace Congress, headed by Mr Cobden, has done that which no war congress in modern times has been able to effect. They have caused the disappearance, in five years, of a million and a half of our people, while the most sanguinary war recorded in our annals was attended, in the same time, by an increase of as much. They have stopped the increase of the remainder by depriving so many of them of bread. They have been worse enemies to human happiness than either the rivalry of kings, or the ambition of their ministers: they have done that to stop the growth of mankind which neither the guillotine of the Convention nor the sword of Napoleon had been able to effect. They have not only mowed down the present generation, but prevented the possibility of its restoration; for they have deprived the majority of those who survive, not only of subsistence for the present, but hope for the future.

It was impossible to keep him quiet -there would have been no peace in the shadowy regions of the departed unless this energetic, inquisitive, selfwilled spirit had been allowed to have his own way; and Voltaire, rising to the earth in the city of Paris, (where else could his spirit rise?) started by train to see the Great Exhibition.

Reports had reached him that in a Crystal Palace, not far from the Thames, were to be assembled specimens of the industry of all nationsnothing less than a museum of the works of man. But it was not this only that had excited the curiosity of the philosopher of Ferney. Rumours of a new era of society, of unexampled advancement or development of mankind, had from time to time descended into the territory of the shades, and had kindled a desire to revisit the earth.

It is a well-known fact, for which our mesmeric and clairvoyant philosophers will stand guarantee, that, when spirits return to this world, they (as in the curious case of a double consciousness) forget their spiritual existence, and re-assume the mental habits, as well as the corporeal forms, of their earthly lives. Thus it is, that whilst nothing is more common than the apparition of such spirits, we never learn anything from them of their own spiritual world. They could not tell us. They are at the time oblivious. By dint of certain strong terrestrial sympathies they have become invested with their past consciousness, and do, in fact, return to their former selves. This point has been so satisfactorily cleared up, that a brief allusion to it is all that can be necessary. Henceforward let no one be surprised that the ghost of a man speaks so much like the man himself, so much like a mere mortal revived; for, as Mrs Crowe and others will explain to him, it is precisely because the departed spirit is absorbed in its past thoughts and feelings, that it has become a ghost. This is the very philosophy and the true scientific explanation of a ghost.

Our spiritual visitor, of course,

made his appearance upon earth in the same flowing wig and ornate costume which he wore that night at the opera, when, surrounded by beautiful women, and almost overwhelmed by the adulation of the crowd, he exclaimed that he was in danger of being " stifled by roses." But these honours of the toilette he was compelled to exchange for the more simple costume of the present day. Some disadvantage he felt, from the necessity of speaking English, in the conversations which ensued a language which he never spoke with perfect ease; but, if his wit could not fairly be displayed in it, he still retained something of the terseness and simplicity of his style. The verbose periods of our modern speakers and writers he was by no means disposed to imitate.

"Progress! progress!" muttered our returned philosopher to himself, as he whirled along upon the railway. "What a din this age makes about its progress! It travels fast enough, if that were all. Rapid progress of that kind. For the rest-let us see whether the world is revolving in any other than its old accustomed circle."

Very soon-but not before he had revived his impressions of our great metropolis - he stood in the park before the Crystal Palace. He saw it glittering before him he entered, and beheld its dome arching with ease the full-grown elm tree; and when he reflected that this immense and novel structure had been designed and reared, and all the materials constructed for it, in a few months, he could not defend himself from a certain enthusiasm. It was evident to his penetrating mind that there must have been an admirable organisation of labour to accomplish all this; and that not only had the architect and the engineer been there, with all their skill, and taste, and ready invention, but that a well-disciplined army of workmen of every description must have been at hand to second their intentions. Here, thought he, is a just triumph for the political economist. Out of the free labour of the artisan,

to be got only by paying for it, to be retained only so long as the workman is content with his bargain-out of materials apparently so uncontrollable as these, an organisation and discipline has been created for the purpose of industry, equal to any that the Grande Monarque could boast of for the purposes of war.

On every side of him, as he surveyed the products collected in the building itself, he saw proofs of the same effective discipline of the industrial force. A profound philosopher, and a countryman of his own, accosted him as he was revolving this idea. "Pardon," he said, "I see that, like myself, you are engaged in contemplating the principles of things, the great results, not the petty details, of this Exhibition. What do you suppose is the purpose of this extraordinary display of the fruits of human industry?"

"I am willing to be enlightened," was the courteous reply.

"Sir, our princes of the earth have gathered together all the products of industry, and they have called together the industrious classes to behold them. They say-this is what you have produced-this is yours! Large-handed industry is invited to inspect her own productions-invited to inspect, perhaps more than to There inspect, her own property. are two words I see everywhere written about the walls of this building. They are not Tunis,' or Turkey,' or 'France,' or 'Austria;' they are two little words addressed to human industry-Make! Take!' 'Take! Make!'"

"True! very true!" said the philosopher of Ferney. "These are the products, and, if you will, the property of industry-but of industry that has submitted to discipline, that has submitted to subordination. Take! But if the army of industry loses its discipline in the pillage, it will only take once-it will never make again. You may then efface both your little words for ever from the walls."

“Esprit borné!" muttered the profound socialist, and turned upon his heel.

"Ah!" said our wit and philosopher, "it was always thus. I can remember I always received that

compliment whenever I said anything indisputably true."

He proceeded to the department where the machinery is exhibited. Here a professor of mechanics was so courteous as to explain to him the various processes of our cotton manufacture. He explained the powerloom, the mule, and I know not what other contrivances beside; and, pleased with his intelligent listener, he launched forth into the glorious prospects that were opening to human society through the surprising mechanical inventions that had illustrated our age. To labour man was born, he said, but we should take the sting out of the curse; it would cease to be toilsome, cease to be degrading, cease to be incompatible with refinement of manners and intellectual culture. Stepping through an open door into a neighbouring department, the professor found himself in the presence of a gigantic locomotive standing upon its railway. "Here," he exclaimed, "is one of our iron slaves; we feed him upon coal; he bears us, a thousand at a time, with the speed of an eagle, from town to town, from county to county. What limit can you set to human progress when you reflect upon such an engine as this?

แ

Voltaire did reflect. "Very clever are you men," he said; you cannot exactly fly-you have not yet invented wings-but you go marvellously fast by steam. No spirit need travel quicker. But methinks there is something hypocritical and deceptive in this obedient engine of yours. Goes of itself, you say. Does it? Your iron slave wants many other slaves, unfortunately not of iron, to attend on it; on this condition only will it serve you. No despot travels with so obsequious a train, and so subservient, as this quiet-looking engine. Putting my head out of the window of my railroad carriage, whilst we were yet at the station, I saw an industrious mortal going from wheel to wheel with a huge grease-pot, greasing the wheels. He greases wheels from morning to night; eternally he greases. Another man trims lamps incessantly; I saw him with a long row before him feeding them with oil; in oil he seems

himself to live. Of engineer and fireman I could not catch a glimpse, but I saw a crowd of men employed continually in putting boxes and carpetbags from a truck into a van, and from a van into a truck. Not much intellectuality there. And when the shrill whistle was heard, and we started, lo! there was a living man standing on the bank, acting signalpost with arm outstretched and motionless, a living signal-post. Most useful of men no doubt, if mortal necks are worth preserving, but his occupation not such as could possibly be intrusted to one who might wander into reflection. The railroad train runs, it seems, not only upon those hundred wheels of iron which we see and count, but on a hundred other wheels forged out of human flesh and blood."

"You are perfectly right," said a pale melancholy Englishman who was standing beside them, and had overheard this conversation. "We are altogether in a wrong course; we are making machines that enslave ourselves, and bind us down to all the toils and all the social degradations of slavery. We must go back to simplicity. We must learn to limit our desires, and discard fictitious wants. Then only can the reign of Justice commence. If all men were contented with the gratification of the simple wants of nature, all men might be equal, and equally enlightened. Our task ought now to be not to invent more machines, but to select from those already invented the few that are really worth retaining. For my part, I find only two that are indispensable."

"And what may they be?" said the professor of mechanics with a smile of derision.

"The plough and the printingpress. With these two, and the principle of justice, I would undertake to make a happy community of human beings. Bread and books! what more do we need? Here is supply for mind and body.”

"No! no! no!" exclaimed Voltaire, who retained all his horror of this return to primitive simplicity. "Get as much civilisation as you can. Let as many enjoy it as can. If you had nothing but the plough, you might dispense with your printing

press as well. What on earth would your rustics have to write about? Bread and books! and what sort of books? Bread, books, and an Egyptian priestcraft-pray complete your inevitable trio."

"Sir, you blow hot and cold with the same mouth. Our mechanical inventions are but rivetting their fetters on the industrial classes: you see this; and yet when I would break the machine you interpose."

"He who talks on man must blow hot and cold with the same mouth. He has always lived, and always will live, in the midst of contradictions. Let us hear nothing of this return to simplicity and ignorance. No savage happiness for me. The Fuegans-so a traveller from South America once told me when they are hungry, kill a buffalo, and, scraping the flesh from off the bones, make a fire of these bones to roast the flesh withal. What admirable simplicity in this self-roasting ox! Here is your golden age at once. I recommend to you a voyage to Terra del Fuego.'

"Are we then," said the plaintive idealist, "to see nothing in the future but the contradictions and turmoils and iniquities of the past?"

"And what men endured in the past, why should not you also and your posterity endure? The type of civilised society has been again and again presented upon the earth: we may improve, we cannot materially alter it."

"There," said the professor of mechanics, "I must be allowed in some measure to differ from you. I observe that you have a due appreciation of the arts and inventions that contribute to civilisation; but you do not sufficiently understand the enormous progress that this age has made beyond all others."

"Pooh! pooh!" said his impatient auditor, "there is a vast

difference between civilised life and savage, but the progress you make afterwards is but slow and slight. You take a wild country, and from a swamp reduce it to a cultivated plain. Corn is growing in the field. The change is immense. Well, you may grow still more corn in the same field, but you can never produce any other change like that which it

has already undergone. Between the wild Celt or Saxon and the civilised inhabitants of Paris or London, who would not acknowledge the difference? But I would as willingly have lived in the Paris of a hundred years ago, as in the Paris of to-day. A wealthy citizen of Bruges or of Florence in the fifteenth or sixteenth century passed, I suspect, as rational, as agreeable, and as dignified a life as the wealthy citizen of your own monster metropolis in the nineteenth century. He would not enjoy quite such immense feeding-not such luxurious banquets as your Guildhall and your Mansion House can boast, where you spend as much at a dinner as would have built the Parthenon-but he perhaps found a compensation in a keener zest for art at all events he lived in a city which had not quite blocked out every charm of nature, in which every green thing had not withered, and where the sky was still visible. At Athens and Rome, and, for aught I know, at Babylon and Thebes, men have enjoyed life as keenly, and lived as wisely as they do here. Many are the eras of the past where you may point to the city, the seat of government and the arts, and the neighbouring cultivated country where the peasantry have enjoyed the protection, and shared to some extent the mental culture, of the town. Such has been the type of civilised society hitherto; nor is it always that the last instance in order of time presents the most attractive picture.

"I walk," he continued, "through the spacious streets and squares of London. I see the residences of your wealthy men: the exterior is not pleasing; but if I enter, I find in each what deserves to be called a domestic palace. In these palatial residences, many a merchant is living amongst luxuries which no Roman emperor could have commanded. I lose my way amidst the dark, noisome, narrow streets and interminable courts and alleys of this same London. Each house each sty-swarms with life. And oh, heaven! what life it is! They are heaped like vermin. They prey upon each other. How they suffer! how they hate! Full of corroding anxieties, they endure wretchedness and torture which no

a

"I tell you I have seen the beggar at Naples. He is a prince. He lies in the sun, on the earth-it is his home-and the open sky above him, it is his. He rises to beg, or to work, or to steal-he does either with a savage energy-then lies down again, no leopard in the forest more carelessly dispread. But poverty in England is steeped to the lip in bitterness, in care, in hatred, in anxiety. When bread comes, it is eaten with fear and trembling for the future. Tears are still flowing upon it. Yes, you have indubitably progressed thus far: you have made hunger reflective."

"But, sir, we are at present in a state of transition. Say that hunger has become reflective: in the next stage of our progress the reflective

man

will have protected himself against the chance of hunger.”

"A state of transition! I am charmed with the expression. What age ever existed that could not have accounted for all its sufferings by this happy word, if they had but known it? Oh, the world, I think, will be very long in a state of transition! But, gentlemen, we must use our eyes, as well as other organs-however gratifyingly employed—in a place like this. Pray, what is that, he inquired, as they stepped into the central avenue of the building, "round which so eager a crowd is collected ?"

"That is the Great Diamond-the Koh-i-noor, as it is called-once the boast of some Great Mogul, now the property of the Queen of England."

"Oh! And what is that to the right, where a crowd almost as dense is congregated?"

"They are the jewels of the Queen of Spain.”

"And on, further to the left, I see another crowd into which it is hopeless to penetrate."

"They surround the blue diamond, that has been valued at I know not how many thousands of pounds."

"The children!" cried Voltaire. Then turning to his professor, he added, "You who will make all classes reflective, pray begin with these gentlemen and ladies. When your celebrated navigator Captain Cook visited