improvements on Dartmoor pay him or not, the thing is done it is a ктnμа iç άe-a present to his country of so much skill, labour, cultivation; and the mind must be sadly warped which can find, as some do, in such an action a reason for contempt. But farther, why may not the joint-stock company principle be applied to farms as well as to railroads? Why may not a board of directors, by means of their skilled servants, cultivate vast sheets of country with a skill, an energy, a largeness of design as yet unknown? What will Cockney directors know about farming?' Why, what did they know about railroads? Are railroad directors engineers and surveyors? No, they are simply men of capital and men of business, who have the happy power, as yet unknown to most farmers, of recognising the men of really practical science, and setting them to work-as they did Stephenson and Brunel as they will hereafter some of the very men whom Professor Low holds up to the ridicule of ignorant and conceited boors. A war, or some other cause, may check foreign investments; profits, according to their law of tendency towards a minimum, may and will temporarily sink so low as to make the chance of profit by land-investments worth consideration; and we may see, perhaps, in the course of a very few years, large joint-stock capitals poured out upon the half-tilled lands of Britain, to the immense improvement both of culture and cultivators. Doubtless, there will be hasty speculations, failures, losses; but the money will be there-so much surplus capital locked up-surely in a better place than if it were with the last surplusses, in repudiated loans and trainless railroads.

But even thus the ideal object of scientific agriculture, the maximum of production, would not be as certainly reached as by 'la petite culture' of Belgium

and Lombardy. Why, then, may not the experiment be made to combine the two, by means of associate labour, in which every individual employed on a farm, from the mere paid worker to the capitalist, should receive his proportion of the profits, the muscle of the labourer and the skill of the scientific man being credited to them, as they easily may be, as so much capital?

Mr. John Stuart Mill, in his chapters on the probable futurity of the labouring classes, which we would gladly notice more at length did space allow, points to some such arrangement as the certain goal of modern industrial society.* It is at least a question deserving careful consideration, whether the benefits of a plan which has been found already successful in the Cornish mines and fisheries, and in various handicrafts both in London and Paris, may not also be extended to agriculture. Why should not, hereafter, a whole parish, for example, be cultivated by one large associate corporation, in which all the civilizing appliances of the model lodging-houses might be combined, without the least intrusion on family independence, with the economy of a common kitchen, washhouses, stores, school and library-why not a common place of worship also ? The government of such a corporation, even if

*The value of this organization of industry' (he remarks, in summing up his important discussions on this subject), for healing the widening and embittering feud between the class of labourers and the class of capitalists, must, I think, impress itself by degrees on all who habitually reflect on the condition and tendencies of modern society. Although, therefore, arrangements of this sort are now in their infancy, their multiplication and growth, when once they enter into the general domain of popular discussion, are among the things which may most confidently be expected.'

Miss Martineau, also, in a letter to the Leader' newspaper, advocates experiments of the kind to which we refer, and which are so important in the adjustment of the labour question.

every member possessed votes in proportion to his capital, would always remain in the hands of the most wealthy and skilful; while the very poorest would acquire self-respect, independence, self-restraint, chivalrous and self-sacrificing diligence, under the ennobling consciousness of corporate life and permanent interest, and under the wholesome pressure of the public opinion of the community. The division of labour might be carried out to an extent as yet unknown in agriculture, and yet combined with a civilizing variety of occupation. The sales and purchases of the establishment might be conducted by a single salesman, who could visit markets now inaccesible to most farmers, with an enormous saving of that time, trouble, and horse expenses which are now wasted in market journeys by isolated farmers. At the same time, it is by no means necessary that the whole population of such an establishment should be devoted to agriculture. On the contrary, the maximum of sewage-manure being the condition of fertility, it would be advantageous to admit a proportion of artisans, who might send their goods up to the metropolis, as the watch-makers of Penzance do now, and while sharing in the blessings of country life, be themselves a benefit to the soil. the materials of manufacture, such as tobacco, silk, or flax, were grown on the farm, the amount of capital combined would allow of machinery being erected to work them up. The machinery need never be idle; whether steam or water-power, there would be always employment for it in grinding corn, in scutching flax, or in pumping sewage-manure; and thus the enormous water-power of our moors might be made the very agent of their cultivation, manufacture and agriculture might be combined in the same community, and the civilization of Manchester spread the energy which it

If

possesses, and receive the health it wants, amid the wasted solitudes of the Yorkshire hills.

This is but an ideal; imperfect, distant, perhaps impossible; yet the increasing number of authoritative names which sanction such experiments, affords at least a fair ground of hope to any wise and benevolent capitalists who may be inclined cautiously to attempt, step by step, the realization of these or analogous agricultural reforms.

And if this be not the ideal future agriculture of the world, still an ideal there is, to be revealed and realized in God's good time. Man stands upon the earth to replenish and subdue it; to conquer the brute phenomena of nature by obedience to her laws; and the same God who has given him that mission, has promised him, in a hundred passages of holy writ, that he shall be enabled to fulfil it.

THE WATER SUPPLY OF LONDON.*

THE

HE law of Laissez-faire, held by some of the earlier political economists to be absolute and inviolable, is gradually receiving its due limitations, without losing its ground as a law founded on the right, or rather on the duty, of every man, to be self-energizing and selfdeveloped. Laissez-faire,' in its extreme meaning of 'no human government whatsoever,' is in fact the ideal state of mankind, the realization in society of Augustin's 'Ama, et fac quicquid vis;' and in proportion as men are men, and their humanity on all points whatever is developed and perfected, they may be safely left to the suggestions of their own hearts and

reason.

But 'Ama, et fac quicquid vis,' is by no means identical with 'Ama teipsum, et fac quicquid vis;' and a state of society in which self-interest is the ruling

* THE NORTH BRITISH REVIEW, No. XXIX.-1. The Principles of Political Economy.' By J. S. Mill. Second Edition. London, 1850.-2. 'Memorial to Lord John Russell and Sir George Grey from the Metropolitan Sanitary Association.' London, 1851. -3. 'General Report of the Sanitary State of the Labourers of Great Britain.' London, 1842.-4. Report of the General Board of Health on the Supply of Water to the Metropolis. App. I. Returns to the Queries Addressed to the Water Companies. II. Engineering Reports and Evidence. III. Medical, Chemical, and Geological Evidence.' London, 1850.-5. Report of Do. on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848-9. Appendix (B) to Do.' Report by Mr. Grainger. London, 1850.-6. A Microscopic Examination of the Water Supplied to the Inhabitants of London. With Coloured Plates.' By Dr. Arthur Hassall. London, 1850.