We encourage

we somewhat grudgingly allow ourselves once a year. our children to become proficient in all out-door games of strength and skill in order to minister to their health and enjoyment. But by the same sort of inexplicable folly that causes our wives to discontinue their music and painting after inarriage, we business men gradually allow the physical part of our education to lapse, as though nature had altered her laws and we were no longer subject to them. These are the days of dyspepsia, disordered liver, and blue-pill. Men cannot eat this, nor drink that, and their stomachs are in a state of chronic insurrection. Unnatural rotundity of person is ever before us, and biliousness throws its gloomy and desponding shadow all around our path. The C.L.A. recognises these evils and seeks to counteract them. Walking clubs have existed in our midst for years past. Tricycles-that latest and best gift of Providence to middle-aged humanity—are almost as numerous amongst us as members, and it is getting the rule for Friday's debates to be debated over again on wheels on Saturday afternoon. Last and best of all, Rounders-prince of games and glorious heritage of early C.L.A. days--flourishes periodically like a green bay tree, and renews our youth like the eagle's. It is worth something to see our grave and reverend seniors play Rounders on a June afternoon; for though their eyes may have grown somewhat dim, and their natural force of hitting abated, they have all the earnestness, the determination to win, the quarrelsomeness, the noise, the genuine fun, and rather more than the subsequent stiffness, of school boys out for a holiday. And they will tell you that sleep is the sweeter, and dreams the pleasanter, and next day's work the easier for that one day's relapse into boyhood's carelessness and mental freedom. If you would lighten the weight of business troubles, sweeten your tempers, soothe the little irritating worries of domestic life, and bring your mental powers up to the scratch, give your limbs and your lungs a chance, and take them both into the country oftener than you do. Don't consider it beneath the dignity of a Director of a Company, or a Town Councillor, or a Deacon, or a Justice of the Peace, to stop at home from business for a whole afternoon now and then to play cricket with his sons or lawntennis with his daughters; and remember that grey hairs and white flannels are not necessarily incompatible.

As regards the other and more serious use of our leisure hours, that which concerns the cultivation of the mind, and the expansion of the higher faculties, it is a large subject and a difficult one too. The direction in which each of us must seek his intellectual recreation, and the extent to which we can carry it, must differ according to circumstances, and as the bent of our individual taste inclines us. The vast world of literature lies before us awaiting and inviting exploration The mysteries of science, numberless and varied as the stars in heaven, offer an exhaustless field of rich investigation and study. The genii of music and the fine arts stand on the threshold of their respective temples beckoning us to enter and worship at their shrine. The problems of social life, the history of nations, the teachings of archæology, the

enchanted ground of poetry and fiction, the diversities in creed and forms of worship; what mines of wealth for the intellect to delve into and enrich itself from! In the eloquent words of a modern writer, 'Life to the opening mind seems like a delicious feast, the most magnificent banquet ever spread by a kind Creator for a favoured creature, the amplest conceivable provision for a being of the most capacious and various desires. The surface of the earth is strewed with flowers; the

path of years is paved and planted with enjoyments

the sunny glories of the day; the pale elysian grace of moonlight, the lake, the mountain, the primæval forest, and the boundless ocean; "silent pinnacles of aged snow in one hemisphere, the marvels of tropical luxuriance in another; the serenity of sunsets; the sublimity of storms; every thing is bestowed in boundless profusion on the scene of our existence; we can conceive or desire nothing more exquisite or perfect than what is round us every hour, and our preceptions are so framed as to be consciously alive to all. The provision made for our sensuous enjoyment is in overflowing abundance; so is that for the other elements of our complex nature. Who that has revelled in the opening ecstacies of the world of thought, does not confess that the intelligence has been dowered at least with as profuse a beneficence as the senses ! Who that has truly tasted and fathomed human love in its dawning and its crowning joys, has not thanked God for a felicity which indeed passeth understanding! If we had set our fancy to picture a Creator occupied solely in devising delight for children whom he loved, we could not conceive one single element of bliss which is not here.'

And is it conceivable that man, created in God's own image, with aspirations and capabilities only a little lower than the angels, should be born into a world like this, so full of beauty and attractiveness, and wilfully shut his eyes and turn his back upon it all? And yet that is just what is being done all around us at this moment. What care men for Shakespeare, or Tennyson, or Carlyle; for Gibbon, Hallam, or Macaulay; for Beethoven, or Mozart; for Raffaelle, Turner, or Ruskin; for Cuvier, Huxley, or Darwin; for Adam Smith, or Montesquien; for Francois Zavier, or Martin Luther? Have they not their Standard, and Daily Post; their Belgravia and London Society; their Money Market Review and Mincing Lane Fournal; their World, Truth, and Tit-Bits?

Gentlemen, I wish with all my heart it were possible to exterminate at least two-thirds of the Magazines and Newspapers now fattening on the idleness and mental dissipation of English men and women. This rage for so-called news; for society scandal; for police-court filth; for ready-made politics; and for intellectual scraps and hashes, is one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of a better employment of the leisure of business men. Precious hours that might be devoted to something like systematic study, and the acquisition of real and valuable knowledge, are frittered away for the latest leaders on the latest political storm in a tea-pot. As much time is wasted in mastering the local records of ward elections, flights of Bank Managers, and trials of back

sliding Wesleyan preachers-printed, by the way, with a length of prurient detail for which I should like to visit the publisher with fine and imprisonment—as would enable business men, for example, to master French and German, and travel the continent with an adequate knowledge of its chief languages. But although I might say much more on this head, and indeed have anything but exhausted my subject, I must remember that this meeting has work before it, and that the limits of my time as well as your patience have already been exceeded.

I know there are superior persons who, from the lofty pinnacle of their Pharisaism, profess to look down upon all such Associations as these, and refer to them with a contemptuous shrug as 'Mutual Improvement Societies.' These individuals, whose orbit lies in a more sublimated and æsthetic ether, can't bring their superior minds down to the level of understanding us and our doings, and find our growing prosperity a puzzle and a stumbling-block. How we get on without their august patronage, and flourish in spite of their sneers and sarcasm, is as great a mystery to them as that men engaged in trade should dare to question their infallibility in matters of literature, art, and morals.

Gentlemen, if there is one negative influence more than another to which the C.L.A. owes its wonderful immunity from dissension and disaster, it is that we have always given superior persons a wide berth and treated their curse or their blessing with equal indifference. It is our pride and our boast that, with few exceptions, we are engaged in trade; that through no fault or choice of our own, we have to earn our livelihood by work which is often uncongenial and sometimes even ignoble ; that in order to procure comforts and luxuries for ourselves and those whom we love, we spend the best hours of every day for long weary years in blunting our faculties and deadening our soul's sensibilities;and yet that with odds such as these against us, which are terrible when compared with the chances of those around us whose professions are one continued education and culture in themselves, or whose life is all leisure in its freedom from pecuniary cares; we are found thus banded together, helping one another to attain some measure of the higher enjoyments and graces of life.

In conclusion, let us try inore fully to realise, in the words of the late Arthur Helps, that "we are not here to promote incalculable quantities of law, physic, or manufactured goods, but to become men; not narrow pedants, but wide-seeing, mind-travelled men. Who are the men of history to be admired most? Those whom most things became; who could be weighty in debate, of much device in council, considerate in a sick-room, genial at a feast, joyous at a festival, capable of discourse with many minds, large-souled, not to be shrivelled up into any one form, fashion, or temperament."

I

A Little Question of Political Economy.

'N the course of the debate on "Private Ownership of Land," which took place on the 23rd November last, I said that all exchangeable value was produced by labour. Probably some of those who differed from me on that occasion wondered how I could have the hardihood to make such a statement, with such a fact as "unearned increments" staring me full in the face. Instances might have been and indeed were cited, of land having risen enormously in value in and around Birmingham, simply by reason of the town's growth, and without any effort or merit on the part of the landowner. I might have been asked, what labour-whose labour-had produced this augmented value?

If the pages of the Magazine may be accorded me for the purpose, I shall be glad of the opportunity of defending my position. Premising only, that in stating it I conceive that I am stating a rule, and that I am not unmindful of that other rule, that there is no rule without an exception.

Let us be quite clear what this rule is. It is that the marketable value of anything whatever is in just proportion to the value of the labour embodied in it, that-and no more. I have to make this theory fit in with the fact that land which was perhaps only worth £100 a generation ago, may be worth £10,000 now; no labour having been bestowed upon it meanwhile. To do this I must go through a little train of argument, which shall be as brief and as plain as I can make it. The first thing to be noted is, that there are differences in the value of labour. That of a navvy is mere excrcise of muscular power; that of an engraver is the result of training and long practice. Three or four hours' work of a navvy might be worth only one hour's work of an engraver, because in every stroke the latter takes, he embodies the result of all the past labour expended in acquiring his present skill.

The labour of a great painter has a value of another kind. The public is willing to pay him a price, covering not only all the value of his present exertion and past training, but something considerably over and above, on account of his rare and exceptional gifts. This part of the marketable value of his works, therefore, would appear to be produced by the desire of the public to possess them, rather than by the labour embodied in them, strictly speaking. We have thus brought out the rule, and an apparent exception. Let us leave it so for the present,

and pass on.

In appraising the value of some kinds of labour, we are driven of necessity to the expedient of striking an average. The labour of a gold digger is a case in point. One digger may toil a whole week for a few grains of gold; another may find a nugget worth a thousand pounds in the first few minutes. We do not value each man's product according

to the labour he has bestowed upon it, but we try to ascertain how much labour on the average is required to produce a given quantity of gold. If each digger, working his own claim, were lucky one week and unlucky the next, in like proportion with all his fellow diggers, then the average would be struck in each individual case; and so it would be even in the case of the nugget-finder, if he were the owner of all the claims, good or bad, and worked them by deputy. But the element of lottery is inseparable from this, as from many other employments. Then just as the payment of the prize to the winner of a lottery satisfies the claims of all the participants in that lottery-so does the payment of £1,000 to the fortunate nugget-finder, satisfy the claims of his less fortunate brethren, who all started with an equal chance to himself.

Now, if we return to the case of the eminent painter, it will not seem so exceptional as before. He is the man who has found the nugget; he has drawn a prize in the lotteries-of Nature. He has found within himself a gift, which might have lain there undiscovered had his energies not been turned in one particular direction. A host of minor artists are toiling round him, each conceiving himself to have the same chance of discovering that gift, but in very many cases without the least prospect of success. Their labour is, to a certain extent, abortive and unremunerated, as is the labour of the less fortunate gold-diggers. But the payment to the great artist must be held to satisfy their claims, by that sort of rough justice which is the best that can be expected from the world under ordinary circumstances.

But, now, suppose the case of an owner of a picture bought originally at a small price, but now worth some fabulous amount, by reason of the artist's subsequent eminence, the lapse of time, or perhaps only some capricious change in the public taste-in what way can this enhanced market value be divided from labour? Here, surely, is an instance of "unearned increment," and a clear exception to the rule. Let us again leave the illustration for a moment and proceed further.

The labour of the navvy, the engraver, the great painter, and the golddigger, is all labour of production. But there is another kind of labour quite as necessary to the economy of Society, and that is the labour of distribution. He who simply conveys goods from hand to hand embodies a labour value in them by the act of so doing. A great part of the price of a ton of coals, for instance, consists of the labour value of their haulage. The distributor may be merely a carrier, or he may be a commission agent or broker, or he may be a merchant, or he may be a dealer buying on his own account, with the expectation of being able to sell again at a profit. In the last case it is probable that he will devote himself to some particular line, such as his special knowledge fits him for. With a special knowledge of horses he may be a horse dealer; of cattle, a cattle dealer. With a special knowlege of art, and of the general current of public taste, he may be a picture dealer. This special knowledge is beyond question a labour value embodied in him, the result of previous training and cultivation. Or if it be even a kind of instinctive or intuitive perceptionan exceptional gift of nature—it has, in some sense, a labour value on the