just laws, exhibit any of those fearful contrasts of wealth and poverty which are the blot on our European States; because (as now with the free West Indian negro) every physical comfort, almost every physical luxury, would be within the reach of any one who was willing to labour daily just long enough to keep his body in health. The ideal of what a tropical white nation might be, when properly acclimatized (and acclimatization is now perfectly easy to the decently sober and prudent man), is, if we will but let our imagination soberly work out the details, too dazzling to be dwelt on long without pain, beside the fearful contrast which the social state of Europe presents to it at this moment, and is likely to present for many a year to come.

We will pass on to Mr. Mansfield's experiences of Buenos Ayres, and the country about the River Plate, learning always the same sad lesson of boundless waste, neglect, and incapacity

I need not tell you that all the land almost, between the Andes and the Paraná-Paraguay, is one vast plain; all the southern part of which, almost, is now sacrificed to that lowest and most degraded form of occupation, that sham of industry, the feeding and butchering of cattle,—a vile occupation, delighted in by master capitalists, because it yields them a return on their money with the employment of the smallest possible number of workmen,-delighted in by workmen, because their employment is a lazy one, which excites none of their faculties, except those necessary to enable them to sit on horseback, and to rip the hides off half-killed oxen. I should like some of your lovers of flesh to see the reeking horrors of the saladeros of the River Plate.

I have no sympathy with the author's vegetarian predilections: but putting them aside, the facts which he gives prove a waste of animal food, and of animal matter valuable in other ways, frightful to contemplate:

Dead horses and oxen everywhere. . . the immense quantity of bones is quite wonderful; they are, I am told, used as fuel by the

The road is repaired

poorer people for cooking and heating ovens. by filling up the holes with them, and in some places you see hedges made of them. I have seen one or two corrals (cattle-pounds) surrounded by fences made entirely of the bones which form the cores of the horns of oxen. . Besides the waste of land (which might grow corn), the cruelty and the disgusting scenes which all this implies, I am annoyed by the consideration of the enormous waste of animal matter, which putrifies in the open air, and which might all make ammonia or saltpetre.

Large quantities of these bones, it should be said, are now imported into Europe as manure; but what a double Laputism' is involved in the facts! An industrial system so out of gear, that we find it actually cheaper or at least easier, (and this in spite of our unrivalled mechanical appliances,) to transport bone manure across the Atlantic, than far more valuable town manure a couple of miles! Tens of thousands here glad enough of sheep's trotters or tripe once a week; good beef in tons putrefying there. It is sad and ludicrous enough: the one comfort is, that the laws of supply and demand are not asleep, though man may be; and that little is wanting on our part, save increased information, to tell the masses who demand in vain, where the supply is; and increased education, to give them the courage and self-help whereby they may avail themselves of nature's infinite bounty. Let us teach on, and have patience. If the meat cannot go to Europe, then Europe will go to the meat; and where the carcase is, nobler animals than eagles be gathered together.

Already Mr. Mansfield saw the promise, here and there, of a better state of things. Here and there an Englishman or a Frenchman tries agriculture, and succeeds at once. What else could be expected?

Fancy (says Mr. Mansfield) the capabilities of these lands, where they plant woods of peach-trees for fire-wood and to feed their pigs —not because the fruit is not first-rate, but because there are not men enough to eat it. Olives, too, grow in great perfection at

Buenos Ayres, and the vine luxuriates in the upper provinces Mendoza and Tucuman. Here is a land of corn, oil, and wine; and as for the honey, as if it was not enough that there should be a score of sorts of bees to make it, the very wasps brew delicious honey. The Banda Oriental and Entre Rios have the same capabilities as the plain of the West, with such other advantages as are given by a more undulating and broken ground, with a great deal of mineral wealth. Further north, in Corrientes and Paraguay, you have the semi-tropical and tropical climates, where the richest oranges, sugar, coffee, tea, yerba maté ( Paraguay tea'), silk, and all the glories of a sun-blest vegetation, are to be had for the asking. Then as for intercommunication. In those parts where the country is hilly there is the best water-carriage in the world; and over the plains, what a country for railways! The whole Pampas ought to be furrowed with tram-roads (not to speak of steam locomotives, which they do not want yet): here is an employment for the thousands of horses which are to be had and fed for nothing. The glorious timber of Paraguay (there is in Appendix D a list of some thirty species of useful timber, by W. G. Ousely, Esq.) will do for the trams. Iron is not needed.

Paraguay itself is, he thinks, to be one of the great timber-markets of the world.

The obstacle to exporting timber from Brazil is the difficulty of getting it to the coast: here, however, is the Paraguay-Paraná ready to float down the timber from the interior.

This suggestion Mr. Mansfield follows up by a very bold and original one, which, we hear, is about to be adopted in practice. Why should not the timber be floated bodily across the Atlantic in rafts, as it is down the German rivers, only towed by steam? Of course, to do it safely, and to make it pay, it must be done on a large scale: the trans-oceanic raft must be a great island of timber, which will defy the storms by its very size.

I have no doubt (continues Mr. Mansfield, with one of those flashes of scientific imagination with which this book abounds) that the next generation, instead of loading ships with Wenham Lake ice-blocks, will tow icebergs from the Pole to the Equator. These rivers do not want steam to navigate them. Glorious water-gods, they are of extra size, on purpose to do all the work themselves. I wonder why rivers have never been made to do their own tug-work.

And then he proceeds to sketch plans for stationary water-wheels which shall tow craft up the stream, and for floating factories to which those on the Rhine below Mannheim shall be baby-toys.'

The power available on this Paraná is positively unlimited; humau hands need do no labour within hundreds of miles of its banks. Oh, what an enormous reservoir of force utterly wasted! Verily, the exuberant bounty of God is awful, and the idleness of man is ghastly.

Whether each and every one of what Mr. Mansfield calls his 'dynamical dreams about this huge deluge in harness' be mechanically possible, is little concern of ours. Probably they are; for he was a scientific mechanician of no common order. But let the details go for what they are worth; the idea, the spirit which underlies them, is still invaluable. Surely this is the truly practical, the truly philosophic method of looking at man and nature, to look at them in hope and in faith; not to call upon humanity to fold its hands in the stationary state, in the very years in which it is discovering means of progress unparalleled in any age, and to abnegate its own powers just as it becomes conscious of them.

By a series of small good fortunes, Mr. Mansfield found himself in November, 1852, in Paraguay itself; almost the first Englishman who had entered it for many years. The sight of fresh, vast capabilities, not merely in the soil and climate, but in the people themselves, excited in him lofty hopes, which alas! were brought to a sudden end by his untimely death and the colonization of Paraguay, his darling scheme, must now be the work of another brain than his. That this colonization must take place, sooner or later, it is hard to doubt: and indeed the recent movement of sending thither French emigrants is the first step of a great movement to which we can wish no better for

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tune than that it may be guided, or at least assisted, by such a mind as has left in this book fragmentary tokens of its own power, earnestness, and chivalrous self-devotion to the public weal. The district which most excited Mr. Mansfield's hopes, however, was not Paraguay itself, but the 'Gran Chaco,' that vast tract which lies to the north of the river Paraguay, in length from Santa Fé ten degrees of latitude northward, and six degrees of longitude in breadth—a splendid country possessed by wild Indians alone, in which the simple and indolent Paraguayans (though it is separated from them only by the river) literally dare not set foot, for fear (forsooth) of Indians whom the Jesuit missionaries, though they did not convert them, visited safely from end to end of the land..

It is just known that the rivers are or may easily be made navigable, and the rich verdure of the country is visible from the top of this house; and that is all that is known about it. . . . The country still is open. The only positive right which the neighbouring republics claim with respect to it, is that which they have doubtless in common with the rest of the world, that each may extend its frontier so far as it can into the Chaco, by encroachment of actual occupation. But not being able to do this, they add the negative dog-manger claim of refusing to other people the right to do the

same.

However, two years after this letter was written, a nucleus of civilization, it seems, began to be formed in this neglected place; a Bordeaux company having obtained a grant of land opposite Assuncion, which they are to colonize with a thousand families,-Irish, French, and Spanish (the latter two, Mr. Mansfield supposes, will be Basques.)

This latter supposition springs from the fact, that so great has been the Basque emigration to Monte Video of late, that some years ago there were whole villages in which nothing but Basque was spoken. Meanwhile the omnipresent Irishman has found his way