vicar of the parish was called upon to ask from the Most High a blessing upon the work of that mighty piston, and prosperity upon the gigantic scheme. Romancing again?' Oh dear, yes! Oh dear, yes! Of course he is romancing. Nevertheless that worthy vicar is still alive, and there must be hundreds of people still living who were present on the occasion, and who remember the feasting if they have forgotten the prayer. That pump was very big, but so was the hole it pumped at. It pumped up nothing but water, and when there was no more water to pump, the shareholders were poorer by at least one hundred thousand pounds. But it was a sublime pump. Take another instance: 'I'm an apiary, sir!' said a shiny being who called upon me the other day. A what?' 'An apiarist is, I believe, the more correct term, sir; and I am soliciting orders for my new hives!' How that man did talk! He had got hold of some scheme--and I am seriously informed it is actually a feasible onefor increasing the normal size of the common domestic bee (Apis ignoratissima) by somehow knocking two cells into one, and producing a sort of double-barrelled bee, and adding enormously to your stock of honey, sir.' It appears that we can absolutely increase the size of our bees indefinitely, and that the men of the future will have hives as roomy as an omnibus. Appalling prospect! Think of a bee as big as a rat bouncing into your greenhouse, bellowing hoarsely while he ravishes the orchids, or flopping into the nursery sugar-basin, glaring with his huge eyes at the terrified baby. Edith Evangeline-for Sarah Anns have gone to a better world-would drop down inane a lump of hysterical despair. We shall have to suppress these things by Act of Parliament at last. Meanwhile my shiny friend does not lack for orders, and if he has his will he will speedily improve off the face of the earth the little busy bee whom we used to sing of, and, because we sang of, to love. Alas! it is more than doubtful whether we love the big things after all. This anxious talk about the masses betrays more fear than philanthropy. Men almost confess in so many words, 'If we don't do something for them, they'll do for us-confound them!' Pity is no true child of Fear. For me, I do not live among the masses; let those who know them speak out as they do, some bravely, some wisely, some wildly. The masses will never lack advocates pleading their cause, often from very mixed motives, and their advocates will always be listened to. But I do know a little about the humble poor in the country villages, living in too many instances with none to care for them save the parson and his family-often as poor as themselves—and none to speak for them save such as wish to use them for their own ends. The great stream of public opinion flows on, recking little of them and their concerns, hid away as they are in the quiet little corners where the current is not felt, and hardly an eddy of the rushing tide stirs. No one takes account of their struggles or wrongs. If crying injustice is done them, or bitterness consumes their hearts, no remonstrance comes. Let me not be mistaken as if I were at all inclined to set up the claims of the agricultural labourer against those of the artisans in the towns. We have heard enough to shock us all, to horrify us all during the past few months; we have had almost more than enough of sensational stories of squalor, besotted brutality, and degradation, till the public are beginning to be a little wearied of the sickening details. If these things are remediable, let us spare no efforts to find out the remedy, and apply it without shrinking, whatever it may be. The chances are that no one remedy will be found sufficient, and in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom, if only we know how to extract the wisdom and leave the folly. Foolish schemes and wild ones there are sure to be, but let the most foolish have their say if they can get a hearing. Even bunkum has its use, for it is one of the great laws of the universe that there should be everywhere and in all things much allowance for waste. Meanwhile Thank God, say I, for any plan To raise one human being's level, It is a very hopeful sign that, of all the various schemes that have been ventilated for ameliorating the condition of the dwellings of the poor, that which has been received with most favour is the one which is associated with the name of Miss Octavia Hill. That heroic lady— practical, dashing, and sagacious, and none the less heroic because she would probably with a merry laugh deny the soft impeachment of being any heroine at all—has done what she has done by sheer personal influence and force of character; she has worked alone, and in her own way; she has been guardian and secretary, inspector and collector; above all, she has been her own committee and her own board of management. The world has been ready with its homage now that success has crowned her efforts; but the value of those efforts seems to some of us to consist very much less in what may be called the bigness of the success than in this, that Miss Hill has impressed us all with the enormous importance of personality as a factor, which some reformers are too apt to leave out of account when setting themselves to solve great social problems. Monster evils, we are told, can only be got rid of by resorting to monster machinery; and as the greatest of all machines is that convenient abstraction the State, so are we assured by the philosophers of a certain school that the State is to be resorted to as the grand engine for effecting everything that requires to be done. Scarcely less imposing, considering the vast resources which are supposed to be at its disposal, is that other sublime abstraction the ratepayers, with a paid-up capital to fall back upon equal to that which Mr. Montague Tigg described as a figure of two with as many oughts after it as the printer can get into the same line. What cannot these two vast machines produce between them? What? One thing they certainly cannot produce-they cannot produce another Miss Octavia Hill by the offer even of a liberal salary. Under certain conceivable circumstances the necessity-we will not discuss the question of the duty-of providing shelter for the working classes might become so urgent as to demand that accommodation should be provided at the expense of the community. Mr. Forwood says that things have reached this point at Liverpool. On the other hand, if I understand Mr. Chamberlain, Birmingham is so far from requiring any such drastic measure, that it is in a fair way of becoming the paradise of the working man. After all that has been written about the London poor, there are not wanting philanthropists who very vehemently protest that in the metropolis, taken as a whole, things are not nearly so bad as they have been represented, and, at any rate, that the agencies already at work are still upon their trial, and the emergency by no means so great as to call for State aid. It is not in England that the difficulty presses with most alarming incidence. In Paris the working classes seem to be far worse off than in London. In Belgium the population is almost twice as dense as in Great Britain. In America the state of great cities is already beginning to occasion serious alarm. The question of housing the working classes is larger than a national one. Among ourselves we seem to be coming to this conclusion, that the towns can settle this question for themselves, some in one way, some in another. We are jealous of being looked after too much, of being dictated to in matters of detail, of being governed by a department of the executive. It is otherwise in la belle France. In view of the alarming increase in the death-rate which has lately been made public, Paris has been stricken almost with panic-except that people in a panic take to flight wildly, and from Paris nobody runs away. Yet if it be true, as has been stated, that in thirteen years the mortality per thousand from typhoid, diphtheria, small-pox, and scarlet fever has increased nearly threefold, it is hardly to be wondered at that Frenchmen should begin to feel uncomfortable at the condition of their metropolis, or that the Municipal Council should have invited suggestions from practical men to deal with the evils that can no longer be ignored. The response to this invitation has shown not only how large a portion of the public attention has been given to the subject, but it has shown also the amazing fertility of resources which Frenchmen still possess. No less than 650 schemes have been sent in and submitted to the consideration of the executive. Among them all, hardly one has been put forward which looks to philanthropists as a class from whom any aid is to be ex pected. Paris does not believe in philanthropy. There the State or the capitalists are credited with infinite resources. The taxpaying classes and the monied men are supposed to be able to correct all possible evils; and while nobody seems to think that the burdens on land can be increased indefinitely, everybody seems to believe that the trading classes can bear all that is put upon them. Nay, some French economists are already beginning to tremble for the future of the landed interest, and-more far-seeing than some theorists among ourselves-they have already begun to utter their warning that what is wanted is not only to make the towns more pleasant to live in, but to make the country more attractive to the tillers of the soil. It is strange that among us hardly a voice has been raised to sound the same note. Granted that the house accommodation for the working classes in London or Liverpool were as bad as the most sensational writers have declared it to be, this does not keep the countrymen away; the cry is, Still they come. But where do they come from? Not from the pretty cottages with the pleasant gardens; not from the model houses on the rich man's estate, who will not permit overcrowding, and whose pride and delight is to see the woodbine clambering over the porch, and the chubby children patting the pig in the sty. They come from the tumble-down hovels run up on no man's land-Heaven knows when or by whom— the hamlets, as we call them for want of any better name, which belong to the firm of Grasper, Grind, and Sponge, and which the young fellows whom we are beginning to educate find simply uninhabitable. In the towns the bad houses do not drive the best men away, in the country they do. To the towns the stream of immigration flows on, unchecked by any deterrent force which the slums may exercise. In the country the labourer is not deterred from going, he is only deterred from staying. It is to him a hideous prospect to begin where his father left off, and to leave off in the hole where you ask him to begin. You have taught him the first element of self-respect; at any rate, you are trying to teach it him. It is not for want of a chance of acquiring elementary notions of personal cleanliness and decency, if he has not learnt something of both one and the other. You are enlarging his range of ideas, stimulating his ambition, appealing to his imagination, tempting him to read books and newspapers, and in so far as you succeed in your laudable endeavours to raise him he is pretty sure to ask himself and others some very searching questions, to look ahead, and to look around him, and to feel The lift Of a great instinct shouting Forwards! Begin where his father left off? Nay; he is already miles in advance of any point to which his father ever dreamt of attaining. 1 But see the speech of Lord Claud Hamilton in the Times, Jan. 26, p. 10. VOL. XV.-No. 85. DD 'Stay here to grovel with the swine, and not half as well cared for? Not I! There may be few prizes and many blanks "up in the shires." Here there are none; I'll try my I'll try my luck at any rate; I may rise-I can hardly fall-I have nothing to lose. Yonder-not here —they tell me there is something to gain. Away!' So the drain goes on, and all our brightest and most adventurous leave us, as if they were so many rats afraid of drowning when their prescience told them that the ship was sinking. The towns absorb them all. London, the devouring monster, with its ravening maw swallows them down. Liverpool, that sentina gentium, sucks them in-some to sink, some to rise. You do not rid us of our worst, you only rob us of our best. Can it admit even of question whether or not it is sheer madness to let the exhaustion of all enterprise and all personal worth from the villages go on unchecked till only helots are left to scratch the fields and feed the hogs? 'You've some very handsome farm buildings, Mr. Dix.' 'So I ought to have—I farm over 2,000 acres, and I've six landlords. Why, I've ninety-seven horses at work-all told.' 'How many men do you employ? 'How many hands, do you mean? That's as it happens. In such weather as this we turn 'em off, of course.' Of course! They're hands already-coming and going. Hands, and very cold hands too in the frost and snow. Hands with scanty. fires to warm themselves at when the pools are ice and there's nothing to do on the land. Hands that feel into empty breeches pockets then, and find small comfort in that kind of employment. At the risk of repeating the twice told I cannot forbear from reminding my readers of some matters which may appear to many too obvious to require being dwelt on. But the ignorance of the habits of country life and its conditions-the blank, absolute ignorance-on the part of the vast majority of townsmen, is so unfathomable and undeniable that the only chance of getting any hearing at all from those who derive their knowledge of the country exclusively from the newspapers is by stubborn reiteration and by 'pegging away.' Among other facts which it is at this time very needful to insist upon is this very simple one, that there are villages and villages.' That which exists on a large scale in the towns is to be met with in the country, though under very different conditions. Arcady has, so to speak, its May Fair and its Belgravia, its Bermondsey and its Whitechapel. That is, there are parishes which are pre-eminently respectable—carriage-keeping parishes; and there are those where it may be said that every one is working for his daily bread. 6 In the former the resident landlord is supreme, and owns every acre; he has his well-appointed mansion, his home farm, his bailiff's house, and his ornamental cottages: the labourers are well |