for every furrow less that is ploughed, one hungry man the more appears in your streets, and swells the surplus that brings your wages down. That surplus is your difficulty! You meet it in your factories and workshops; you see it in your thoroughfares; you find it in your workhouses; you trace it in your gaols. Pauperism and taxation, ignorance and vice, immorality and crime, follow in its wake. Believe me, there is no more costly thing than an idle man. Surplus labour is the sure ruin of every country, and yet how little you think of it! You have statistics of fallow land, but where are your accounts of fallow labour? And yet the fallow land improves, and man degenerates by idleness. That surplus labour is a national loss. If you spill corn or wine, you deplore it as a waste; but you do worse-you spill the labour that creates them. You mourn if you lose a fractional percentage on the money in your bank--which is but the representative of wealth-but you think nothing if you lose a vast percentage of the country's labour, which is the wealth itself. That surplus is loss-dead loss. It is that you have to meet, that you have to deal with. It is that which tempts the avarice of the master and calls forth the hostility of the man. It is that which divides not only different classes, but one class against itself. It is that which sets the unionist against the non-unionist in fratricidal and suicidal strife.

ERNEST JONES.

NEGRO SLAVERY.

I TRUST that at length the time is come when Parliament will no longer bear to be told, that slave-owners are the

best law-givers on slavery-no longer suffer our voice to roll across the Atlantic in empty warnings and fruitless orders. Tell me not of rights-talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I deny his right, I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings, of our common nature, rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim ! There is a law above all the enactments of human codes-the same throughout the world— the same in all times—such as it was before the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night of ages, and opened to one world the sources of power, wealth, and knowledge; to another all unutterable woes—such is it at this day— it is the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and hate blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty phantasy, that man can hold property in man! In vain you appeal to treaties, to covenants between nations. The covenants of the Almighty, whether the old covenant or the new, denounce such unholy pretensions. To these laws did they of old refer who maintained the African trade. Such treaties did they cite, and not untruly; for, by one shameful compact, you bartered the glories of Blenheim for the traffic in blood. Yet, in spite of law and of treaty, that infernal traffic is now destroyed, and its votaries put to death like other pirates. How came this change to pass ? Not, assuredly, by Parliament leading the way; but the country at length awoke; the indignation of the people was kindled; it descended in thunder, and smote the traffic, and scattered its guilty profits to the winds. then, let the planters beware-let their assemblies beware

Now,

-let the government at home beware--let the Parliament beware! The same country is once more awake to the condition of Negro slavery; the same indignation kindles in the bosom of the people; the same cloud is gathering that annihilated the slave-trade; and if it shall descend again, they on whom its crash may fall, will not be destroyed before I have warned them; but I pray that their destruction may turn from us the more terrible judgments of God. LORD BROUGHAM.

THE CONTROVERSIES OF THE PRESENT TIME. We live in times of change-political change, intellectual change, change of all kinds. You whose minds are active, especially such of you as give yourselves much to speculation, will be drawn inevitably into profoundly interesting yet perplexing questions, of which our fathers and grandfathers knew nothing. Practical men engaged in business take formulas for granted. They cannot be for ever running to first principles. They hate to see established opinions disturbed. Opinions, however, will and must be disturbed from time to time. There is no help for it. The minds of ardent and clever students are particularly apt to move fast in these directions; and thus when they go out into the world, they find themselves exposed to one of two temptations, according to their temperament—either to lend themselves to what is popular and plausible, to conceal their real convictions, to take up with what we call in England humbug, to humbug others, or perhaps, to keep matters still smoother, to humbug themselves; or else to quarrel violently with things which they imagine to be passing away, and which they consider should be quick in

doing so, as having no basis in truth. A young man of ability now-a-days is extremely likely to be tempted into one or other of these lines. The first is the more common on my side of the Tweed; the harsher and more thoroughgoing, perhaps, on yours. Things are changing, and have to change, but they change very slowly. The established authorities are in possession of the field, and are naturally desirous to keep it. And there is no kind of service which they more eagerly reward than the support of clever fellows who have dipped over the edge of latitudinarianism, who profess to have sounded the disturbing currents of the intellectual seas, and discovered that they are accidental or unimportant. On the other hand, men who cannot away with this kind of thing are likely to be exasperated into unwise demonstrativeness, to become radicals in politics and radicals in thought. Their private disapprobation bursts into open enmity; and this road too, if they continue long upon it, leads to no healthy conclusions. No one can thrive upon denials: positive truth of some kind is essential as food both for mind and character. Depend upon it that in all long-established practices, or spiritual formulas, there has been some living truth; and if you have not discovered and learnt to respect it, you do not yet understand the questions which you are in a hurry to solve. And again, intellectually impatient people should remember the rules of social courtesy, which forbid us in private to say things, however true, which can give pain to others. These rules forbid us equally in public to obtrude opinions which offend those who do not share them. Our thoughts and our conduct are our own. may say justly to any one, You shall not make me profess to think true what I believe to be false; you shall not make me do what I do not think just; but there our

We

natural liberty ends. Others have as good a right to their opinions as we have to ours. To any one who holds what are called advanced views on serious subjects, I recommend a patient reticence, and the reflection that, after all, he may possibly be wrong. Whether we are Radicals or Conservatives we require to be often reminded that truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, are no creatures of our own belief. We cannot make true things false, or false things true, by choosing to think them so. We cannot vote right into wrong or wrong into right. The eternal truths and rights of things exist, fortunately, independent of our thoughts or wishes, fixed as mathematics, inherent in the nature of man and the world. They are no more to be trifled with than gravitation. If we discover and obey them, it is well with us; but that is all we can do. You can no more make a social regulation work well which is not just than you can make water run uphill. I tell you, therefore, who take up with plausibilities, not to trust your weight too far upon them, and not to condemn others for having misgivings which at the bottom of your own minds, if you look so deep, you will find that you share yourselves with them. You, who believe that you have hold of newer and wider truths, show it, as you may and must show it, unless you are misled by your own dreams, in leading wider, simpler, and nobler lives. Assert your own freedom if you will, but assert it modestly and quietly; respecting others as you wish to be respected yourselves. Only and especially I would say this be honest with yourselves, whatever the temptation say nothing to others that you do not think, and play no tricks with your own minds. Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, humbug is the most dangerous.