next finds a field for its exercise in manufacture.

He

employs the best labour, because experience has taught him that in the long run it is the cheapest, and the high wages which he pays are justified by the efficiency of his workmen. He uses the latest inventions in machinery, adopting each new discovery as it is made, renewing and replacing all that is antiquated or worn out, watching with an eagle eye all the improvements around him, and appropriating them to his own business. He suits the working hours of his factory to the efficiency of his men, and so not merely does he have the maximum of product, but he avoids, as a rule, those difficulties between employer and employed which are the source of so much heartburning and mental strain, and lead to so much waste in production. And, lastly, he finds the best market for his produce. For him the world is a field for constant study; the capacities and prospects of each country, and the probable demand for the commodity which he manufactures, are always in his thoughts. The first sign that a market is becoming glutted with his wares is a warning to him to leave it; the developement of the resources of a new district attracts him as a possible opportunity for placing' his goods. The combination of all these qualities may be said to make 'mankind's epitome;' but such a combination is essential for the highest type of success, when business is so complicated as we see it in modern times. The community in trade is but the individual writ large;' the same causes co-operate to ensure success in the one case as in the other, and the same weaknesses mean failure. The first requisite for success in foreign trade is cheap raw material, whether destined for actual manufacture or for the food of labourers. The defenders of free imports into this country seem at times not to have the courage of their convictions, and not to state the case as strongly as it may be stated. It is the command of cheap raw material in every department of production on which the commercial supremacy of this country rests. The competition of America is weakened, if not destroyed, by a protective tariff; and we venture to predict that if that tariff be modified or suppressed, and Free-trade be adopted on the other side of the Atlantic, we shall be embarked upon a struggle far more severe than any in the past. In manufacture we trust that enough has been said to show that the race is to the swift,' that the advantage lies with that nation which has the most efficient and the best equipped working class. The rate of wages in a country

must be considered strictly in connexion with the 'produc'tivity' of its labour, and the statement that we are and can be undersold by cheap labour' must never be accepted without a thorough examination of its exact meaning. No amount of apparent economy under this head in production will compensate for the absence of physique, of skill, of moral qualities on the part of a nation's workmen. The possession of a highly organised and productive machinery goes with a highly paid and efficient working class; for a high rate of wages is the best stimulus to the adoption of improved machinery, and at the same time the standard of living which it implies among the labourers makes the use of such machinery possible. It is the possession in a high degree of these various advantages which has made the competition of this country dreaded far and wide. Germany, for example, wages are lower, hours are longer, machinery is old-fashioned, concentration in production is in its infancy, and the cry is constantly going up for protection against England. Well may Mr. Mundella say that the long hours of labour on the Continent are our chief protection against competition from that quarter.

In

And the future of the labourers themselves is bright with hope. We have outlived the theory that wages must of necessity represent the minimum which will support human life; we have gone behind the somewhat vague explanation which refers them to supply and demand, and we have come more and more to see that wages stand in immediate relation to the product of labour. The apprehension of this truth has not been without its effect on practice. Everywhere we see efforts made to increase the efficiency of labour. Tradeunions have gradually given up their fallacious hopes of raising wages permanently by reducing the number employed or the amount produced in any occupation. They rely rather on the guaranteed superiority of their members as the ground of their claim for higher pay, a result due in part to the discipline which organisation implies, and in part to the imposition of tests of membership, such as sobriety and sustained industry. Co-operative societies among working men not only help to make demand more regular and constant, but they also, by cheapening the necessaries of life and improving their quality, increase the physical fitness of their members, whilst they foster habits of self-government and self-control. Nor is the State idle in the same field. The guarantee of wholesome workshops and dwellings by a system of inspection, the provision of the requisites

of the mens sana in the form of general and technical education, libraries and museums, and the like-all make in the same direction, and if they do not immediately raise the standard of life, are, at least, conditions precedent to its rising. Nor is it necessary or wise to attempt to fix the limits of such activity on the part of the State. How far, for example, it should control the hours of labour is a question which will probably be decided by the general consideration at what point is authority needed to bring up the laggards, to enforce on the more backward of manufacturers, in the interest of labour, the lessons which unaided self-interest has taught the more capable. In all such matters the general lines on which legislation should proceed may be said to be settled, for our generation at least, irrespective of party, and in the twentieth century we may hope to see the progress of the nineteenth continued, whilst the errors which have marred that progress, and have led many to speak of it with bitterness, are remedied, and, as far as may be, avoided.

ART. III.-1. Letters to Marca. By GEORGE B. LESLIE, R.A. London: 1893.

2. Birds of Devon.

By W. S. M. D'URBAN, F.L.S., and the Rev. MURRAY A. MATHEW, M.A., F.L.S. London: 1893.

3. Sport and Nature. By T. E. KEBBEL. London: 1893.

A MARKED feature in English literature during the last forty years is the great increase which it exhibits in works relating to rural life and natural history. What has been called the return to Nature' received a new impetus about the middle of the present century from a class of prose writers who then began to appear upon the scene, and gave a new turn to the reaction which had its origin in the Lake school of poetry. It would be unjust, indeed, to Wordsworth's predecessors to ascribe the sole credit of it to the movement with which his name is associated. But he breathed a new spirit into the culte which Thomson had revived, and a craving for something more than the mere external beauty of landscape to which The Seasons' is exclusively confined, helping at the same time to diffuse among all classes of readers a new interest in those delightful studies which in the days of Gilbert White were only appreciated by a select few. In fact, botany and entomology

are singled out for ridicule in the fourth book of the 'Dunciad' as pursuits beneath the dignity of the human intellect; and we imagine that curiosity in such things as bats, newts, and tortoises would have fared no better in the hands of the satirist, had he been equally familiar with them. It was not till nearly a century afterwards that the love of bird, beast, and insect began to give rise to a literature of its own, distinct from the sympathy with inanimate nature of which Wordsworth is the best known exponent, and was shared with experts and connoisseurs by that very representative personage, the general reader. The two tastes may now be regarded as one. But they are still one with a difference; for, though all zoologists are lovers of Nature, all lovers of Nature are not zoologists; and if we contemplate the two interests under their exclusively modern aspects, we shall find considerable unlikeness in the sources to which they are traceable.

Washington Irving, whose love for English scenery shows itself so strongly in the Sketch Book'-and who in the impressions which he received from it, on his first landing in England, strikes a note in harmony with much that will be found in these pages-calls attention to the close observation of Nature which is peculiar to the English poets, and to the delicacy and fidelity with which, from Chaucer downwards, they have depicted all natural objects. He is thinking, however, chiefly, we imagine, of the Elizabethan and Caroline poets, with whose disappearance the stream was for a time frozen up, and only began to flow again towards the middle of the next century. We need not carry our inquiry further back than that period, and, speaking broadly, we may date the revival of this taste from the publication of Thomson's Seasons.' It made its way, however, very slowly, and continued for the next fifty years to be redolent of the eighteenth century, with all its materialism, its unsuspecting cheerfulness, and its general satisfaction with the system ' of things.'

6

Thomson had rather an eye than a heart for nature. Whether he is painting the flowers of spring or the heats of summer, the fruits of autumn or the storms of winter, his descriptions are accurate, delicate, and vigorous. But there is no longing, no questioning, nothing wistful in his glance; no sense of any mystery in Nature, no evidence that he hears any of the myriad voices with which she speaks to a later generation. His view is purely objective, which, indeed, according to Mr. Ruskin, is a note of superiority; but of that

more hereafter. He revels in a great luxuriance of epithets, and shows marvellous powers of expression and composition. But there is an end of it. He draws entirely from the outside. A primrose to Thomson was only a primrose after all. The moral influence of Nature was a sealed book to him. We must be on our guard against supposing that conventionality of language-and Thomson is artificial and conventional throughout-implies triteness or poverty of thought. But the sincerity of Thomson's raptures cannot always be taken for granted. When we are in the midst of roses and haycocks, cataracts and thunderstorms, Savage's description of the bard is seldom long absent from our minds.

Thomson's love of Nature was the love of an artist who regards her beauty simply as a fine subject for his pencil. It was not given to him to hear the horns of Elfland, or the reed of Faunus piping in the distant hills. And what is true of Thomson is true also of Goldsmith, and partially of Cowper. Goldsmith sketches a pretty little rural scene in The Deserted Village'-the sheltered cot, the cultivated farm; but not for its own sake. It is for the sake of a contrastto point a moral. In Cowper, however, the beginnings of a change become perceptible. Without that profound sympathy which was to be the note of a new school just then coming into existence, we see in the author of The 'Task' a genuine love of Nature for her own sake, something quite distinct from the sincerest admiration of beautiful or sublime scenery which was the source of Thomson's inspiration. Nature in her most ordinary and least picturesque attire was sufficient for Cowper. And this is the true test. Thomson describes the valley of the Thames at Richmond, the glories of Hagley Park, the lightning flashing among the Welsh mountains, the hurricane and the flood sweeping away herds and harvests. But Cowper sees poetry in the flat scenery of the midland counties-the Ouse winding through the level meadows, the grassy lanes and thick hedgerows, with the tall elm trees springing out of them. 'Scenes must be beautiful which, daily viewed, Please daily, and whose novelty survives

Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.' *

It is not that the novelty survives, but that the sweet 'monotony' never palls. No true love of Nature can be dependent on her external beauty. She is as much with us

*The Sofa.