had been converted into an inn, and was kept by a family of Yankee Mormons, in partnership with the superior. Here Mr Shaw obtained employment; and a laughable description he gives of his multifarious duties, of his bed upon a soft plank amongst the rats in the granary, of his breakfasts on brandy bitters-the favourite morning beverage of the Mormon hostess and her daughters-of his milking cows and mixing juleps, and of the gambling, cock-fighting, bullockhunting, and other diversions of the frequenters of the tavern. His possession of a tooth-brush, and the use he made of it, were cause of great wonder to the primitive people amongst whom he now found himself. The Mormon ladies looked upon him as a superior being, and were immensely edified by his descriptions of European habits; his master treated him with confidence and consideration; and regular diet and freedom from anxiety renovated his strength, although he was still subject at intervals to a depression of spirits and weakness in the limbs peculiar to that country. His stay at the sign of the Bull's Head, however, was shorter than he had expected, and than his employers wished. Going into San Francisco to make some purchases, the captain of the Mazeppa offered him a free cabin passage to Sydney or the Sandwich Islands-an offer with which he

thankfully closed. Owing to the exorbitant price of labour, the captain, supercargo, and chief mate, had been obliged to discharge the cargo themselves. A portion of it, consisting of assortments of musical instruments, ladies' apparel, and other commodities useless in California, had not paid charges. "As no return-freight could be obtained, the Mazeppa was going back in ballast of sand and rum-this inferior spirit, which would not pay customs' duty, being cheaper to buy than stone ballast." Mr Shaw proposed recruiting his health at the Sandwich Islands, and returning to the diggings in the following spring; but he afterwards changed his mind, and went on to Sydney. His account of the voyage, of his visit to the Sandwich and Navigator's Islands, of Mr Pritchard the consul, and of the manners and customs of the Samoans, is very entertaining. From the first page to the last, his book is full of incident and interest; and although carelessly enough written upon the whole, the reader is struck at times by a sort of vivid simplicity of style, examples of which are afforded by some of our extracts. As regards California, Mr Shaw has unquestionably presented us with the black side of the picture; but we have no reason to think that he has tinted it one shade darker than the facts of the case fully warrant.

In the moral and political sciences the friends of truth seem doomed to wage an incessant warfare with the advocates of error and the patrons of delusion. In these fields of inquiry no ground seems ever to be incontestibly won, and no conquest so securely made as to defy hostile challenge. Errors that had been refuted to the satisfaction of all thinking men, and consigned to the limbo of oblivion, are prone to appear in vigorous rejuvenescence, and to demand, like the heads of the fabulous hydra, a second extermination. In physical science the progress may be slow; but, a step in advance being gained, it can neither be lost nor questioned. The law of gravitation once proved, the most daring Pyrrhonist could not deny it without raising a doubt of his sanity; and the moment Pythagoras offered his hecatomb to the gods, no geometrician could ever be asked to redemonstrate that the square of the hypotheneuse of a right-angled triangle was equal to the squares of the sides. In morals, and the mixed science of politics, so much is the case reversed, that no one position can be held as settled beyond the chance of subsequent controversy. To repine at such a result would be ridiculous, and would imply an unpardonable ignorance of an elementary law regulating every moral and political inquiry. No evidence in favour of any one proposition in these branches of human knowledge can ever amount to scientific certainty; and, not amounting to scientific certainty, no proposition can be determined so that it may not be opened up for fresh adjudication and discussion. These, accordingly, have ever been the fields in which moonstruck speculators have delighted to disport; it being impossible to demonstrate that any experiments made in these metaphysical regions have resulted in disastrous failures.

The adoption of what, by a pleasant fiction, is called "Free Trade," was, at the time, described by some of our wisest statesmen as "an experiment." This was the expression used by the

Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Lansdowne in reference to free trade in corn; and the Earl of Aberdeen, at an agricultural meeting in Scotland, characterised it as a "problem." The language was ominous! To "experiment on the largest interest in the kingdom, and that which admittedly forms the very basis of national prosperity - to experiment on the capital, industry, and welfare of millions of the most loyal and best conditioned of the people-was surely a very daring enterprise in the annals of modern statesmanship. And yet there was candour in the confession. Tremendous was the "problem ;" but in describing it as such, the parties implied a readiness, in the event of failure, to retrace their steps, and to retrieve the injury they had been instrumental in inflicting. But, as an

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experiment," is Free Trade to be ranged in the same category with one of those problems in morals or in politics to which allusion has been made, and which, from their very nature, never can admit of such a certain solution as to render the question at issue no longer doubtful or debatable? Assuredly not. It is certainly an experiment, the success or failure of which can be tested by its fruits. It is, in truth, an experimentum crucis, the results of which admit of ocular demonstration. It may be allowed, indeed, that the Free-Trade policy is a system so vast and complex in itself, and that the influences which contribute to eliminate its results, more especially in the department of agriculture, are so many and various, and so slow and operose in developing themselves, that it would require some time to elapse ere honest but inexperienced observers could be convinced of the actual effect of the change. There can be no doubt, for instance, that the unpreparedness of the Continental nations to avail themselves of the boon bestowed on them by the British Legislature with such cosmopolitan liberality, and the diminution of human food caused by the potato failure, contributed for three years to retard the full effect of Free Trade on

the agriculture of the kingdom.* After the natural consequences of the change began to appear, the depreciation of agricultural produce was alleged, by the admirers of the Free-Trade policy, to be temporary. This was a dishonest pleading upon the part of these gentlemen; for the avowed object of their own measure, in abolishing the Corn Laws, was permanently to cheapen agricultural produce. If it was not, they were duping the manufacturing world; and if it was, they were now deceiving the agricultural community, by asserting that the low price of corn was temporary and evanescent; and on one or other of the horns of this dilemma they impaled themselves. In such disingenuous and ambidexter see-saw it is lamentable to think that her Majesty's ministers have largely indulged. In the Royal Speech of 1850 the Ministry talked lightly of the "complaints" of the agriculturists;

The organs of the Free-Trade press took the hint, and enjoyed a brilliant season of sneering at the Boeotian stupidity and ridiculous melancholy of the "agricultural mind." These were halcyon times for the wits; for then to call a farmer "a chawbacon," "a clodpole," "a horse-shoe idiot," was enough to prove you endowed with the mens divinior. The experiment, however, proceeds;-another year passes away and contributes its quota of evidence. A host of new facts have emerged in the interval; and the truth has assumed so prominent an aspect that Lord John Russell's courage, great as it is, begins to quail, and he feels it necessary to pitch his voice in a lower key. Accordingly, in the Queen's Speech of 1851,

he admits that "the owners and occupants of land are suffering," to the great consternation and manifest inconvenience of the Free-Trade press. To have allowed that the suffering was permanent in its nature, would have falsified predictions of his own but lately broached, and would have compelled him, at the very least, to devote the surplus revenue at his command to the relief of the agricultural suffering. He suggested, therefore, that the suffering was temporary, and incidental to the state of transition in which the agricultural interest was placed; and the other classes being prosperous, (so he thought,) he expressed his conviction that the agricultural community must soon participate in the general prosperity. The Minister has never propounded the reasons on which this conviction is based, and it may be presumptuous in us to divine what they may be. Probably he meant to imply that the prosperity of other classes would enable them to consume more bread and butchermeat, and would thus increase the demand for the products of agriculture. According to the Free-Trade writers, the nation, during the past year, has consumed from nine to ten millions of quarters of bread-stuffs more than it ever did; but it would seem that John Bull's stomach is an abyss of measureless capacity; that his appetite is insatiable, and his powers of deglutition and digestion are unbounded. But if it were so, how would the national voracity benefit the British agriculturist, if unlimited supplies of corn and cattle, at the present prices, as is now proved, can be poured into our market? The logic of the Minister, too, seems not very conclusive or infallible. There are about eight millions in the United Kingdom directly dependent on agriculture for their support,

and there may be about double that number whose prosperity is indissolubly associated with the prosperity of agriculture; and that might seem an inference somewhat more reasonable and natural than what the Prime Minister enunciated, which should suppose that the prosperous classes might ere long participate in the suffering of the agricultural community; that an epidemic so widely spread might communicate contagion to the healthy; that a disease infesting the vital function might extend itself to the extremities of the body politic. But the suffering is the concomitant of a state of transition." The expression is happily vague and mysterious. A state of transition from what, to what? is the question which the experimenters are bound to consider and to answer. Infallibly it is a state of transition; but a state of transition from remunerative prices to prices ruinously low-to invested capital diminished and impaired-to profits obliterated and gone to suffering severe and enduring. But in a little while a farther change seems to take place on the mind of our statesmen, whose opinions on the agricultural depression are plainly in a state of transition, and who seem to be watching, in blank ignorance, the evolutions of their own experiment. The Chancellor of the Exchequer intimated his intention to devote part of the surplus revenue to the relief of the occupants and owners of the soil. But if the calamity was temporary and evanescent, why prescribe a cure that was only admissible in the case of the suffering being constitutional and permanent? A temporary grant might, indeed, have been warrantable; but this was not the measure meditated. To alienate surplus revenue for the purpose of meeting any ephemeral evil, under which any portion of the community may for a time be labouring, is surely the merest financial charlatanry. Very true, Sir Charles Wood withdrew his proffered boon; and for a reason so exquisitely ludicrous, that the nation for a

moment was convulsed with laughter. He withdrew it because the gratitude of the agriculturists was not sufficiently intense, and because they had not proclaimed his generosity in pœans of praise sufficiently enthusiastic! But even after Sir Charles Wood's ridiculous recalcitration, Parliament has passed two measures, trivial in themselves, but implying that the sufferings of the agriculturists are permanent, and intended to minister to them some modicum of relief.* Upon the whole, we may now take it for granted, that the present Parliament at last allow that the agricultural depression is enduring-that the price of grain is permanently lowered. It is of consequence to fix and determine this position in the discussion. The manifold delusions long circulated on this subject will not now avail. The low price of grain was at one time ascribed to an abundant harvest; at another, the potato failure--the universal solvent of every agricultural anomaly-was the cause; now it was temporary and would pass away; and now it is the concomitant of a state of transition. The period for such poor drivel is gone. On the part of the Free-Trade press it was essentially dishonest and uncandid; the avowed object of their policy being to cheapen the loaf, and permanently to lower the price of agricultural produce. The Free-Trade writers, however, seem now unanimously to admit the permanency of the change effected on the price of grain by the Free-Trade measures. The agricultural editorials of the Times are based upon this change as an admitted fact. A late writer in the Edinburgh Review, in commenting upon Sir E. Bulwer's Letters, proceeds upon the same hypothesis. Our Free-Trade pamphleteers manfully speculate upon the present low prices of grain, not only as that which is undeniable, but as what must permanently continue. "The experiment," then, has proceeded so far as to develop one result so clearly, as to admit neither of debate nor denial. The value of grain grown in the

United Kingdom is permanently reduced by the compulsion of an Act of Parliament; and the permanency of the reduction is as certain as anything can be that is dependent upon the seasons.

The permanency of the fall being admitted, there fortunately is no room for mystifying the extent of that fall. The fiars prices of grain, judicially determined every year in the several counties of Scotland, and the averages struck in the great grain markets of England, furnish unchallengeable data, whereby the amount of the fall may be certainly estimated. Without encumbering the reader with statistics, we may mention, that after a careful collation of the prices, it would seem that the prices of grain during the last two years of unmodified Free Trade have fallen about one-third, when contrasted with its average price during the twenty preceding years of Protection. In several of the counties of Scotland, which we have compared, the fall ranges from 30 to 35 per cent. In the great county of Perth, the Yorkshire of Scotland, and which may be quoted as a fair sample of the Scottish corn market, the reduction amounts to a fraction more than 33 per cent. It is unnecessary to dwell upon this part of the case, because we are not aware that the amount of the fall in the price of grain has ever been questioned. Indeed, it is scarcely possible that it could be so. It was the permanency of the reduction that the Free Trade theorists so long and so strenuously denied-thus repudiating, with reckless effrontery, the promised blessing of their own policy.

The vital question immediately arises, "Can our national agriculture withstand such a tremendous diminution of its annual income? The husbandman, from the very nature of his art, cannot be speedily ruined, but can he ultimately survive such an abstraction of his means?" The highfarming fraternity were the first to volunteer a remedy, and to solve the question. With flippant confidence they propounded their panacea as the substitute for Protection; but in what high farming consisted, not two of the teachers were agreed. One summoned the farmer to grow more

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corn, another enjoined him to make green crop his sheet-anchor, and the recreant knight of Netherby avows his partiality for pasturage. Bullocks were "ungrateful fellows," but pigs would do it. Sheep on pasture were profitless, but sheep on "boards " would pay. The mysterious powers of "ammonia" promised to meet the emergency, when, lo! Porcius interposed, and converted the subtle agent into laughing-gas! One wonders how such idle puerilities, such quackish nostrums, could have deluded, even for a day, any portion of the community, however ignorant of rural affairs; and yet it is undeniable that they served to mystify the question, and to prolong for a little while the reign of delusion. The high farming prescriptions, as a remedy and compensation for the 35 per cent of loss on the value of agricultural produce, were most effectually exposed, and they have passed away as entirely as Cobbet's crotchet about locusttrees, or the cow-cabbage mania of 1836. The high farming friends of an injured agriculture have either retired from public notice, discomfited and abashed, or are totally neglected. The sufferings of the patient are too poignant to allow him to be even amused with their fantastic recreations. The lucubrations of Mr Mechi fail even to awaken a momentary interest, and the farmer of Tiptree Hall has sunk into a Mechior insipidus. It is impossible, however, not to admire the brave enterprise and manly candour of Mr Mechi. Robbing no tenant, and experimenting at the expense of his own pocket, he is quite an experimenter to our mind, and worthy of all approbation. Were, however, his agricultural adventure to prove profitable, of which there is an entire lack of evidence, it would be utterly chimerical to suppose that Mr Mechi's system could be introduced into the general agriculture of the country. Mr Mechi's capital and genius are alike awanting. His schemes can only be contemplated as curious and interesting, and likely in their progress to evolve principles which, in better times, may be made available in improving the art of husbandry. In the mean time, so far from high farming being in the

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