think so myself. But, with my returning health, the old Adam is somewhat moving. The lassitude of my illness is going away; and I begin to feel a want for motion, for action, for something to stir me. Take me south, James, and There is sport

let us see this war. afield there."

"What war, sir?”

"Oh, you young dolt," said Arthur, laughing. "Give me the footstool, that I may throw it at your head. What war? Why the grand crush between France and Austria, the stake of which is an Italian kingdom. I see how to enjoy life: to cultivate a careful ignorance on political matters."

"But the Kölnische Zeitung says that they are not going to fight," remarked James.

"The Fliegende Blätter may probably say the same," said Arthur. "Boy! boy! there is going to be a great thing,' as the foxhunters say. Take me south to see it. You can sketch it, and sell your sketches. I want motion, life let us go."

"We will go, sir, certainly if you really think they will fight, and if you are able for it."

"You shall carry me," said Arthur. "My brother is in the business, and on the winning side. Old Austria for ever, in spite of all her faults."

"Which of your brothers is in the business, sir" asked James.

"Tom," said Arthur. "Heaven help the Frenchman who meets him."

"I remember him," said James, "a kind man with a gentle face. He carried me to Silcotes in his arms once, after I had been beaten by poachers. By the by, you were there. Do you remember it?"

"I do, now you mention it," said Arthur. "And you are that poor little thing in the smock-frock brought in in his arms.

that Tom I never exHow things

actly realized it till now. come round through all kinds of confusion! My silly old aunt took you to bed that night; and you made your first acquaintance with Dora, and Anne, and Reginald. Well, then, it is settled that we are to go south, and see this war."

"It will be

"I glory in the idea, sir," said James. "I have never looked on war." "Nor I," said Arthur. a cold bath for both of us. The accessories will not be pleasant; but it will do us both good. A review on a large scale, with the small and yet important fact of death superadded; and a kingdom of twenty millions for the stake. A University boat-race, in which the devil actually does take the hindmost. Let us go, by all means."

To be continued.

THE assertion often made by a certain class of writers and speakers, that while the rich are growing richer the poor are growing poorer, is certainly, at least as regards the present century, untrue. The class of manual labourers have derived great advantage from the rapid progress of civilization and of mechanical invention, from the development of commerce and the improved and enlightened legislation of recent years. In material

comfort the distance between them and

the richer members of society is certainly not greater now than it was fifty years ago. Unhappily it is true that, with the growth of wealth and population, the wall of moral separation between rich and poor appears to have become broader, higher, and more impassable. The rich see less of the poor than they used to do; know less of their habits, their feelings, and their wants; and the poor have so little personal acquaintance with the rich, that to many of them the well

dressed neighbours whom they meet in their daily walks, hardly seem as fellowcreatures, with like characters and passions, actuated by the same motives, animated by the same feelings of kindness or of irritation, of sympathy or of selfishness, as themselves.

The mutual ignorance, the incapacity to understand one another, which want of intercourse has produced in rich and poor, which prevails to an extent that may fairly be called dangerous, is illustrated by the absurd caricatures and misrepresentations of either class which find credence among the other. The things that are said of the whole class of rich men, of the aristocracy, of capitalists, by trade delegates and club orators, would fail of all effect if spoken to men personally acquainted with the objects of such abuse. The unqualified panegyries of working-class virtue and intelligence, the dark descriptions of immorality, ignorance, and improvidence, so freely employed in political controversy, could never be addressed to an audience familiar with the real character of the "flesh-and-blood" working man; an audience who knew how many grades of moral and intellectual merit lie between the experience, wisdom, tolerance, and thrift of the Rochdale co-operators, and the recklessness and criminal violence of the unionists of Sheffield; between the working men who take the lead in returning to Parliament Mr. Mill, Mr. Hughes, and Mr. Fawcett, and those who form the most venal element of Totnes and Lancaster.

Most landowners of moderate means, or their families, know something of their peasantry; many country manufacturers know something of their workpeople; but even in these cases the knowledge is too often very shallow and imperfect. Setting aside the few persons actually and personally engaged in benevolent labours (of whom more hereafter), men and women even of moderate means, in our large towns lead a life altogether apart from that of the poor. How many of them ever speak to a working man or woman except in the way of business? How many of them have

any personal relations with persons of that class; any acquaintance with individuals in whom they take an interest, for whose welfare they care, who might not be sick, starve, or die without their knowing it? What does the large manufacturer know of the vast majority of his hands outside of the factory? Has he ever seen them in their homes? Would he know them if he met them in the street? What does the shipowner or merchant know of the men who sail or unload his ship, or carry his goods to the warehouse? They are engaged for the job, by his captain or warehouseman, at the shipping-office or the street corner; they are unknown to him by sight or by name. So far as our towns are concerned, the cases are few and exceptional in which there is any personal tie between rich and poor -any recognition on either side of a connexion that does not end with working hours, or of any individual claim on an individual for anything besides fair wages and honest work.

This alteration is not, apparently, due to wilful estrangement on the part of the rich; still less to any fault on the side of the poor. But, even though no one be wilfully in fault, it is painful to contrast this state of things,-the fruit though it be, of advancing civilization, increasing wealth, and better industrial organization, with what old men now living can well remember to have witnessed, in the service of a kindly or wellprincipled master. principled master. The father of the present manufacturer often knew every one of the hundred or two of hands whom he employed. They lived in their employer's cottages, close to his house and mill, within reach of the daily visits of his family. If one of them were sick or had a sick wife or child, his wife and children visited the cottage, and the master could give what aid was necessary. He would speak to them by name, ask after their families, and commend the progress of their children at the school, at which his own children taught. The merchant had but few men, and they were constantly in his service, and did all his work. It took some weeks to unload

by their aid a vessel of 200 or 300 tons. Now, the ship of 1,500 tons is discharged in a week, under the direction. of the Dock Company, or of a contractor, by a large gang of men, who then go elsewhere; and for the next job a new gang is engaged. Cotton is handled by cotton-porters, corn by corn-porters. The old-time merchant used at Christmas to assemble his men and give to each of them a piece of beef proportioned to the wants of the family, a loaf, and a shilling to buy beer, with a shake of the hand from the senior partner, and "A Merry Christmas to you, Williams; I hope your good wife is stronger," which were the expression of a real interest, and the natural acknowledgment of a tie felt by both parties. His sons may keep up the distribution of beef, bread, and beer; but the personal character of the kindness has disappeared; the Christmas gathering and greeting can no longer be a reality when the men are not known by sight to any partner in the firm. Not even the warehouseman, not even a clerk, has that personal knowledge of the men employed, which the head of the firm once possessed as a matter of course. Even where the master is most disposed to recognise his duty, and the men might be most confident of his kindness, he may be (has been) horror-struck to find that a man, who has been employed by him for years, has been absent from his work for weeks, and is actually reduced by illness to a choice between the workhouse and starvation, while his employer is in utter ignorance of his circumstances.

So it is in most departments of business. And the increase of numbers and capital employed are not the only causes which contribute to sever the old natural ties between rich and poor; distance and want of leisure are added. Fifty years ago the merchant would live over his countinghouse, his warehouse was adjoining, and the dock, where his vessel lay, and his merchandise was unloaded, was within a few minutes' walk. The business was not too large to allow its head to see to its details in person,

and to look after those who were employed therein. Now, the dock is far away from the countinghouse, and its duties are left to others. The merchant is employed all day in the direction of transactions; the executive details are left to subordinates. His work done, the merchant, and even the large shopkeeper, leaves it for his residence at a distance in the country, in a suburb of the overgrown town, or at the West-end of London. He has rarely now leisure or inclination for the public duties, municipal or parochial, which his father discharged when they were more at hand, and less burdensome than the rapid growth of our towns has lately made them. His wife and daughters can no longer call upon the labourer's sick or troubled family in the short walk which formerly brought them into the country. If such a visit has to be paid the carriage must be ordered and time spared for a drive of five or six miles into or through the town. Thus the vast increase of the scale of our manufacturing and mercantile businesses enlarges the number of employés and makes personal knowledge or interest more difficult: the subdivision of labour, and the more thorough organization required by the magnitude of modern commercial transactions, sever the personal connexion which established an evident mutual claim between master and servant; and the less leisure, intenser work, and more luxurious life of the present generation will complete the estrangement of the rich from the poor, unless it be studiously guarded against by methodical effort.

It is not to be supposed that the social duties imposed by the personal relations of olden times were always fulfilled. There is probably as much willingness to recognise, in feeling and principle at least, the claims of humanity and Christian brotherhood now as heretofore. But the difference is this-that whereas in past times the duty was personal and manifest, and could hardly be wholly neglected without some selfreproach for want of feeling and charity, now-a-days the obligation is

more general and indefinite, and can only be performed by those v ho go out of the daily routine of their life to seek opportunities and means of doing it. Of old the individual poor man had a definite claim on the kindness of some individual man of substance. Now the

claim is that of a class on a class; not of a workman on an employer, in whose service his time of health and strength has been spent, but of those who lack the good things of this world, on all on whom God has bestowed those good things in abundance. Such a claim comes home with far less force to the ordinary individual conscience, according to the old saying that "every man's business is no man's business." The duty is much less easy of fulfilment, and its undefined character leads to endless mistakes, and affords endless excuses for a neglect of which so many are guilty, that each feels almost inno

cent.

But this disintegration of society which grows out of the very completeness of its mechanical organization-this alienation and mutual ignorance between rich and poor, as classes, arising from the severance of the old personal ties and the termination of the old lasting relations between individuals rich and poor is at once a reproach to us as a Christian community, a peril to our interests as a free and powerful nation, and an evil of ever-increasing magnitude in its influence on the lives and characters, the moral and physical wellbeing, of each member of what should be one body politic and religious. The The existence side by side of so much useless and needless splendour, so much unmerited and unrelieved destitution, of luxury with squalor, the living picture of Lazarus at the gate of Dives that is ever before our eyes if we but open them, cannot but force upon our conscience the gravest questions as to the individual responsibility of each of us for a portion of the shocking spectacle; the right of each to enjoy his share of the wealth without taking his part in a methodical and sustained effort to relieve the want.

Political economy, rightly

understood, has no salve for these qualms of conscience. It tells us, indeed, that indiscriminate or thoughtless almsgiving -the easiest form of apparent charityis in fact a vice; but it also leaves open to us a vast field for the expenditure of labour and money, and enforces the duty by showing the mode and the conditions of its safe and beneficial performance.

Regard to history confirms the fears of common sense that a state of national life, in which the moral unity of the nation is broken,-in which the rich and the poor begin to form two separate castes, losing mutual comprehension, mutual sympathy, mutual regard, and becoming to each other as distinct races with separate organization, ideas, interests, -is the sure forerunner, the first commencement of rapid national decay. It is by bridging the gulf of separation, by reuniting the severed sympathies, and rekindling the earnestness of personal goodwill between the estranged orders, that we can hope to maintain in vigorous life the common sentiments, the mutual affections, which are the breath of national life. It is only by bringing the two classes once more into relations of personal kindness and friendly intercourse, by service rendered without patronage and accepted without degradation, that we can avert the danger of those terrible collisions between capital and labour (which are the fruit of mutual misconception and irritation, much more than of conflicting interests) which, if less violent, become daily more formidable, from the gigantic proportions assumed by the separate organizations in which the labourers are banded together, apart from, and, as it were, in antagonism to their employers. The extent of this social danger was made plain to careful observers when a hitch in the working of the Trades Union machinery led to a strike in the iron trade of North Staffordshire. The quarrel was taken up on both sides by distant bodies and rival firms; and we were on the verge of witnessing a social war which would have raged from Birmingham to Newcastle, and in which

every ironmaster and every foundryman would have been engaged, closing hundreds of works, and throwing thousands and tens of thousands out of work, merely in consequence of a local squabble. Such, and so mighty, are the separate organizations of the labouring class. Ere long it is probable that all the unions of all the trades throughout the empire will be combined in one federal league, which may bring the whole force of the labouring class to bear on any trade dispute. It is impossible not to regard with the gravest anxiety a state of estrangement and mutual ignorance between rich and poor, out of which it arises that the latter listen to few advisers out of their own class, and most readily to those who most artfully influence the spirit of class antagonism; that the masters know little of what is passing in the minds of their people, are on their part often narrow and onesided in their views of the rights and feeling of their workmen, and if more enlightened, are powerless to counteract the evil influence; and that both parties can be hurried into a serious struggle with no other necessity than arises from mutual misunderstanding and mutual irritation. It is by no means a healthy symptom of our social state, though one to which we are reconciled by habit, that from all the associations of the workmen for mutual support and assistance in every trade, the masters are, and choose to be, excluded.

Beyond the political and social evils which it engenders, this class separation, this caste tendency, has the worst effect on the life and character of both the rich and the poor. Each is withdrawn from a portion of the moral and social influences necessary to the formation and nourishment of a healthy human feeling, and their character is to that extent starved, dwarfed, or distorted.

The more highly-skilled and betterpaid artisans earn much more than is necessary to provide their families with the necessaries and comforts belonging to their station in life. They have more leisure and more money than heretofore. The number of persons of whom

this is true, and the degree in which it is true, are daily increasing. How will this superfluity of means and leisure be spent? Partly in sensual indulgence; and this in proportion to the absence of those moral and intellectual interests which a free and friendly intercourse with men of higher education and cultivated tastes would afford. Partly in occupations of an intellectual cast, partaking of that wider and more social character which men require in their interests, exactly in proportion as they rise above the mere necessities and pleasures of animal existence. Is it well for them, is it safe for society that in those occupations they should form a class apart; that those interests should not be shared with the rich, but separately from, and therefore necessarily tending to become antagonistic to theirs? In proportion as the artisans become better educated, more at leisure from mere temporal needs, they will spend more time and care on political and social questions; it rests with the wealthier classes whether that time and care shall be bestowed in concert with, or in opposition to them; whether the energies of the labouring class shall flow into the common stock, and add enormously to the vigour and power of a united nation; or, as they are now tending to do, form entirely separate organization, life, and interests for the most numerous class of society. is little reluctance among workmen to accept co-operation, and even guidance, and instruction, from those who are fit to guide and instruct them, and willing to proffer that aid on terms of equal friendship. If men of education hold aloof, we must not blame the artisans for falling under the influence of the guides whom men of education most distrust and fear.

There

The poor, those whose animal wants engage their whole energies, and are at times inadequately supplied thereby, must perforce accept aid in any form in which it comes to them. But the aid which is rendered mechanically, whether by law or by voluntary associations, divested of personal kindness and good