public documents were issued by the departments of both Governments, the classes most needing them knew neither how to collect or collate them, and reports of interested agents could not be wholly trusted; while a Government will not lie, nor exaggerate, nor, but rarely, conceal the truth. Since the British Government do not discourage emigration, and cannot prevent it, it is better that our poor fellow-countrymen should be put in possession of information which will enable them to go out with their eyes open, instead of going out, as hitherto, with their eyes mostly shut.' I ought to add here that the Canadian Minister of Agriculture has sent me several valuable works issued in the Dominion, and that the American Government have presented me with many works of a like nature, and upwards of five hundred large maps of considerable value, all of which I have placed at the disposal of the Guild of Co-operation in London, for dispersion amid centres of working men, with whom the founder of the Guild, Mr. Hodgson Pratt, is in communication.

Because I admired many things in America, I did not learn to undervalue my own country, but came back thinking more highly of it on many accounts than I did before. Not a word escaped me which disparaged it. In Canada, as well as in America, I heard expressed the oddest ideas imaginable of the decadence of England. I always answered that John Bull was as sure-footed, if not quite so nimble, as Brother Jonathan: that England would always hold up its wilful head; and should the worse come to be very bad, Uncle Sam would superannuate England, and apportion it an annuity to enable it to live comfortably; doing this out of regard to the services John Bull did to his ancestors long ago, and for the goodwill the English people have shown Uncle Sam in their lucid intervals. As yet, I added, England has inexhaustible energies of its own. But lately it had Cobden with his passion for international prosperity; and John Stuart Mill with his passion for truth; it has still Bright with his passion for justice; Gladstone with his passion for conscience; and Lord Beaconsfield with his passion for-himself; and even that is generating in the people a new passion for democratic independence. The two worlds with one language will know how to move with equal greatness side by side. Besides the inexhaustible individuality and energy of Americans proper, the country is enriched by all the unrest and genius of Europe. I was not astonished that America was 'big '—I knew that before. What I was astonished at was the inhabitants. Nature made the country; it is freedom which has made the people. I went there without prejudice, belonging to that class which cannot afford to have prejudices. I went there not to see something which I expected to see, but to see what there was to be seen, what manner of people bestrode those mighty territories, and how they did it, and what they did it for; in what spirit, in what hope, and with what prospects. I never saw the human

mind at large before acting on its own account-unhampered by prelate or king. Every error and every virtue strive there for mastery, but humanity has the best of the conflict, and progress is uppermost.

Co-operation, which substitutes evolution for revolution in securing competence to labour, may have a great career in the New World. In America the Germans have intelligence; the French brightness, the Welsh persistence, the Scotch that success which comes to all men who know how to lie in wait to serve. The Irish attract all sympathy to them by their humour of imagination and boundless capacity of discontent. The English maintain their steady purpose, and look with meditative, bovine eyes upon the novelties of life around them, wearing out the map of a new path with looking at it, before making up their mind to take it; but the fertile and adventurous American, when he condescends to give co-operation attention, will devise new applications of the principle unforeseen here. In America I received deputations from real State Socialists, but did not expect to find that some of them were Englishmen. But I knew them as belonging to that class of politicians at home who were always expecting something to be done for them, and who had not acquired the wholesome American instinct of doing something for themselves. Were State-workshops established in that country, they would not have a single occupant in three months. New prospects open so rapidly in America, and so many people go in pursuit of them, that I met with men who had been in so many places that they seemed to have forgotten where they were born. If the bit of Paternal Government could be got into the mouth of an American, it would drop out in a day-he opens his mouth so often to give his opinion on things in general. The point which seemed to be of most interest to American thinkers, was that feature of cooperation which enables working men to acquire capital without having any, to save without diminishing any comfort, to grow rich by the accumulation of savings which they had never put by, through intercepting profits by economy in distribution. Meditating selfemployment by associative gains, English co-operators do not complain of employers who they think treat them unfairly, nor enter into defiant negotiations, nor make abject supplications for increase of wages; they take steps to supersede unpleasant employers. With steam transit ready for every man's service, with the boundless and fruitful fields of Australia, America, and Canada open to them, the policy of self-protection is to withdraw from those employers and places with whom or where no profitable business can be done. To dispute with capital which carries a sword is a needless and disastrous warfare, even if victory should attend the murderous struggle. Even the negro of the South has learned the wisdom of withdrawing himself. He has learned to fight without striking a blow; he leaves the masters

who menace him. If he turned upon them he would be cut down without hesitation or mercy. By leaving them, their estates become worthless, and he causes his value to be perceived without the loss of a single life.

I learned in America two things never before apparent to me, and to which I never heard a reference at home: First, that the dispersion of unrequited workmen in Europe should be a primary principle of popular amelioration, which would compel greater changes in the quality of freedom and industrial equity than all the speculations of philosophers, or the measures of contending politicians. Secondly, that the child of every poor man should be educated for an emigrant, and trained and imbued with a knowledge of unknown countries, and inspired with the spirit of adventure therein; and that all education is half worthless-is mere mockery of the poor child's fortune—which does not train him in physical strength, in the art of fighting the wilderness,' and such mechanical knowledge as shall conduce to success therein. I am for workmen being given whatever education gentlemen have, and including in it such instruction as shall make a youth so much of a carpenter and a farmer that he shall know how to clear ground, put up a log-house, and understand land, crops, and the management of live stock. Without this knowledge, a mechanic, or clerk, or even an M.A. of Oxford, is more helpless than a common farm-labourer, who cannot spell the name of the poor-house which sent him out. We have in Europe surplus population. Elsewhere lie rich and surplus acres. The new need of progress is to transfer overcrowding workmen to the unoccupied prairies. Parents shrink from the idea of their sons having to leave their own country; but they have to do this when they become soldiers-the hateful agents of empire lately-carrying desolation and death among people as honest as themselves, but more unfortunate. Half the courage which leads young men to perish at Isandula, or on the rocks of Afghanistan, would turn into a Paradise the wildest wilderness in the world of which they would become the proprietors. While honest men are doomed to linger anywhere in poverty and precariousness, this world is not fit for a gentleman to live in. Dives may have his purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day. I, for one, pray that the race of Dives may increase; but what I wish also is, that never more shall a Lazarus be found at his gates.

GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE.

STORY-TELLING.

THE most popular of English authors has given us an account of what within his experience (and it was a large one) was the impression among the public at large of the manner in which his work was done. They pictured him, he says,

as a radiant personage whose whole time is devoted to idleness and pastime; who keeps a prolific mind in a sort of corn-sieve and lightly shakes a bushel of it out sometimes in an odd half-hour after breakfast. It would amaze their incredulity beyond all measure to be told that such elements as patience, study, punctuality, determination, self-denial, training of mind and body, hours of application and seclusion to produce what they read in seconds, enter in such a career . . . correction and recorrection in the blotted manuscript; consideration; new observations; the patient massing of many reflections, experiences, and imaginings for one minute purpose; and the patient separation from the heap of all the fragments that will unite to serve it-these would be unicorns and griffins to themfables altogether.

.

And as it was, a quarter of a century ago, when those words were written, so it is now: the phrase of light literature' as applied to fiction having once been invented, has stuck with a vengeance to those who profess it.

Yet to make the thing that is not as the thing that is' is not (though it may seem to be the same thing) so easy as lying.

Among a host of letters received in connection with an article published in the Nineteenth Century in December last (The Literary Calling and its Future'), and which testify in a remarkable manner to the pressing need (therein alluded to) of some remunerative vocation、 among the so-called educated classes, there are many which are obviously written under the impression that Dogberry's view of writing coming' by nature' is especially true of the writing of fiction. Because I ventured to hint that the study of Greek was not essential to the calling of a story-teller, or of a contributor to the periodicals, or even of a journalist, these gentlemen seem to jump to the conclusion that the less they know of anything the better. Nay, sɔme of them, discarding all theories (in the fashion that Mr. Carlyle's heroes are wont to discard all formulas), proceed to the practical with quite an indecent rapidity; they treat my modest hints for their instruction as so much verbiage, and myself as a mere convenient channel for the publication of their lucubrations. You talk of a

genuine literary talent being always appreciated by editors,' they write (if not in so many words by implication); well, here is an admirable specimen of it (enclosed), and if your remarks are worth a farthing you will get it published for us, somewhere or another, instanter, and hand us over the cheque for it.'

Nor are even these the most unreasonable of my correspondents; for a few, with many acknowledgments for my kindness in having provided a lucrative profession for them, announce their intention of throwing up their present less congenial callings, and coming up to London (one very literally from the Land's End) to live upon it, or, that failing (as there is considerable reason to expect it will), upon me.

With some of these correspondents, however, it is impossible (independent of their needs) not to feel an earnest sympathy; they have evidently not only aspirations, but considerable mental gifts, though these have unhappily been cultivated to such little purpose for the object they have in view that they might almost as well have been left untilled. In spite of what I ventured to urge respecting the advantage of knowing science, history, politics, English literature, and the art of composition,' they don't see why' they shouldn't get on without them. Especially with those who aspire to write fiction (which, by its intrinsic attractiveness no less than by the promise it affords of golden grain, tempts the majority), it is quite pitiful to note how they cling to that notion of the corn-sieve,' and cannot be persuaded that storytelling requires an apprenticeship like any other calling. They flatter themselves that they can weave plots as the spider spins his thread from (what let us delicately term) his inner consciousness, and fondly hope that intuition will supply the place of experience. Some of them, with a simplicity that recalls the days of Dick Whittington, think that coming up to London is the essential step to this line of business, as though the provinces contained no fellow-creatures worthy to be depicted by their pen, or as though, in the metropolis, Society would at once exhibit itself to them without concealment, as fashionable beauties bare themselves to the photographers.

This is, of course, the laughable side of the affair, but, to me at least, it has also a serious one; for, to my considerable embarrassment and distress, I find that my well-meaning attempt to point out the advantages of literature as a profession has received a much too free translation, and implanted in many minds hopes that are not only sanguine but Utopian.

For what was written in the essay alluded to I have nothing to reproach myself with, for I told no more than the truth. Nor does the unsettlement of certain young gentlemen's futures (since by their own showing they were to the last degree unstable to begin with) affect me so much as their parents and guardians appear to expect; but I am sorry to have shaken, however undesignedly, the pillars of domestic peace' in any case, and desirous to make all the repara