reasonable profit of the retailer to the poor in quantities of half a hundredweight, what the cost of transit from the pit, what the cost at the pit's mouth, what the residuum, and where it goes. The householder pays the price that is asked of him, without question, provided his neighbour pays the same. It can scarcely be expected that he, as an individual, can do anything to obtain better terms, when a much larger trader, the manufacturer, can do nothing but pay an extravagant price for cotton, at a time when the market may happen to be under the control of a fore-hand-bargaining syndicate. All that the old-fashioned manufacturer does is to grumble that business is bad, and does not seem so certain as it was, now that there is so much speculation. Similarly, the housekeeper finds that all the facilities for supply and transport of provisions do not make them as much cheaper as might reasonably be expected. The simple process of dividing the price of any commodity into fractions, each apportioned to a necessary element of the actual cost of production, transit, and distribution, would afford easy instruction to both; and were there any unfair advantage taken at any link of the chain it would stand revealed. Matters like these are certain to come before the public, as they become more and more awake to theory, and understand that analysis may draw as clear a clue through a commercial operation, as through a complicated syllogism. The housekeeper who buys an article in quantity x at a price 2y at one emporium, and a quantity 2x at a price y at another, rent and wages being much the same in both localities of purchase, is being stimulated to inquiry by the very tradesmen who are 80 wrathful now that the public is

seeing its way to doing some of its own business, by choosing its own servants and paying them their equitable wage. But the absence of clear theory, by which tradesman and consumer alike would at least be able to agree on grounds of fact, is conspicuously marked. It would seem so easy a thing to have taught to both of them at school, in what several parts the cost of an article consists. The proper cost of a pound of potatoes sold in a fashionable locality where rents are a percentage higher than in a less wealthy neighbourhood, and the greengrocer's increased charges extend to the stable where he keeps his pony, and the wages he pays his assistants, can be easily calculated in a decimal fraction, as compared with the cost of the same in a poorer neighbourhood, rents being specified. Then statistics may be given of the most profitable extent for such a business to be. A fractional allowance must be made to one tradesman on the score of being too small for the kind of business he has undertaken to be most economically worked, while an estimate of the proportion of bad debts to be allowed for where the system is a credit one, as compared with a cash trade, may rightly come within the price of a pound of potatoes. The arithmetic class in a school might thus afford a lesson in minor political economy, a much more useful subject to the individual of humble mind, than that major political administration which a few born statesmen understand, and which serves as a whetstone for the ignorance of the provincial debating societies.

The reversal of ancient law and custom in the instance of 'forehand bargaining' we have just been considering, may perhaps be accounted as a move in another

than the right direction, however intelligible in view of the very much enhanced complication of our commercial system, and also of the fact that the commercial classes hold a large grip of the reins of power.

A statute which we may, on the other hand, be more glad to have lost, is one by which, a little over a century ago, was made penal, "the contracting, enticing, or seducing artificers to go out of this kingdom into a foreign country not within the dominions of or belonging to the Crown of Great Britain.” Here we are met face to face with the question of the freedom of the individual versus the paternal claims of society, and the individual has won the day. No doubt this country has gained its commanding position, and helped to fulfil its mission in the world, by the scattering of its skilled workers over all parts of the globe. Our bread cast upon foreign waters somehow returns to us after many days. And with our present notions of personal freedom we should find it difficult to forbid an American cousin, or a man and a brother from Rio or Buenos Ayres, to paint in glowing colours to a friend picked up here, the openings afforded by their respective countries. Indeed it could be done by letter in a way that the most ferret-eyed government would find it difficult to take cognisance of. But (apart from a remote contingent return of profit to this country from the instillation, through the distribution of atoms of our nationality over the world, of our notions and tendency to trade) to permit a skilled artisan to leave our shores is very bad political economy, and the sign of a decline in some trade, the revival of which is not speedily anticipated. The injury is of

several kinds. First, the expense of the departed artificer's rearing and education, which the country though its individuals has borne, is rendered a dead weight without remunerative return. The years during which which the man would be producing in excess of his consumption, and so repaying the community, in divers forms, for the expense incurred during his earlier life, will be spent in benefiting some other country, which took no part in the cost of rearing him. Furthermore, the emigration of a competent worker alters the relative proportions of the able and incompetent to the disadvantage of the country quitted. This is a serious matter for an old country, which is rich in charitable institutions, and, by preserving weakly lives, tends to become a lazar house of the lame, the halt, the blind, the sufferers both from physical and intellectual disability, who also are the last to stir from the old country. When a skilled artificer leaves Sheffield for the States, he takes imperceptibly away one-and-twenty years at least of rations, clothes, and schooling; he also throws his acquired faculties and experience into another country's balance of trade against us; and last, but not least, if the proportion of useful people to burdensome people in the row of houses in which he lived was as fifty to one hundred, after his departure it will be only forty-nine to ninety-nine, or just over half per cent. less. But we must "dree our weird;" the whole tendency of the movement of recent centuries has been to unchain the hind from the soil; we can scarcely so revert as to chain the artisan to his workshop. Indeed, the 'ciety, if such a feat were attempted, would soon arrange for him to be the only workman left in that workshop.

Some curious changes are due to the greater perfection and centrality of our administrative apparatus. The bureau tends to overshadow, while it shelters, the individual. Nowadays, should any burglary be committed in one's dwelling house, or any outrage done there, one informs the police and has but a faint hope of their catching the offender. When some dastardly wretch slit the noses of the horses of a relative

of the present writer's, a widow, a century ago, she not only offered a handsome reward herself for the apprehension of the offender, but shared in the liability of another sum of money which was offered with the like purpose of bringing the culprit to justice, by a voluntary association existing in the Hundred in which she resided. And when another dame of the same family some years afterwards suffered from the depredations of a burglar who could not be found, there being no police at that period, she sat up all night with a maid, and succeeding in marking the depredator and having him convicted. Life is made so smooth for us now that we are in danger of losing the robuster faculties of self-help. With the decaying instinct of selfreliance must it be said also, in spite of a few magnificent exceptions which glorify our time, that

there has vanished some of the old generosity in helping others? In the autumn of 1745, the husband of the dame first named above left a proof of his then existence in entering himself with several others of his relatives among the subscribers to a fund "to be applied to the support of His Majesty's Person and Government in this present exi. gency." Should we subscribe in this pleasant freehanded manner to-day? Yes . . . for a consideration! We should subscribe, not to the fund, but to a loan, to be applied to the support of Her Majesty and the Government in a particular exigency. That is to say, we should see that we were well paid for our subscription, by a certain three per cent. accruing to us and our heirs for ever, or until we wanted our money back, and could obtain it by selling our consols for a little more than our

subscription cost us. Moral:

the National Debt in 1745 was under seventy-five millions, now it is well, seventy-five millions pays about three years' interest on it. In the contemplation of this fact we may well conclude these rough notes on theory and law in their relation to commercial practices, for both seem quite powerless to make the debt any smaller.