theory now requires of us to look for the action of a new set of forces, lying deeper in the social organization.

The supposed high profits in Lancashire and similar places must needs attract a great deal of new capital. After our survey of the money market, there can be no doubt that new capital previously unemployed would be ready in great masses to meet the demand. But Mr. Senior's theory takes a far wider sweep than one which would merely clear out the supply from the London money market. It requires of us to contemplate a period when the manufacturing incomes, rising enormously, would not only draw to the north and central districts all unemployed capital, but would actually cause a transfer of capital actively employed, from those employments in which profits were least, to those in which they were greatest, until profits of all kinds reached the same level. Nor is this all; the range of the theory includes a still greater revolution— a change in the habits of man himself, or, in other words, a considerable transfer of labour from employments of the lowest wages to those most powerfully affected by the bullion influx. Then, and then only, the chain of causation would exhaust itself, and a new equilibrium be established; when the flood, heaving up class after class of the variable incomes, loosening as it were the moorings of the most stable industries, and floating them all up, raising the wages of the ploughman, and the salary of the bank-clerk, even the disgracefully poor stipends of the parish surgeon and the parish schoolmaster, should cease its fluctuations, as the last faint wave of change, after communicating, through some unwonted generosity of the House of Commons, its final impulse to the salaries of the servants of the State, died away at the embankment of the funded incomes.

It is true that very extraordinary changes in income did take place during the war, from a somewhat similar cause, namely, the enormous addition artificially made to the aggregate of income-and therefore of demand and prices-by the vast and

I

continued expenditure of the Government. But I pause, without the least ability to see my way through that interminable vista of confusion, uncertainty, and suffering, which is presented by the thought of such a continued action of the gold influx, as would cause an actual transfer of capital from the less profitable to the more profitable employments, to a sufficient extent to restore the equilibrium.

Transfer of Capital.

The regular flow of capital from the less to the more profitable employments, is one of the familiar postulates of political economy, so frequently assumed in its reasonings as to cause most of those who use it to forget habitually that it is only a postulate, admissible as applied to long periods, but utterly contradicting experience, when it is assumed as taking place either rapidly or without the most calamitous reverses of individual fortune. I know the self-rectifying principle in the social organization which draws new capital to the most profitable employments, and also borrowed capital even from active but less profitable exercise; but our concern here is with a vast mass of capital, neither new nor borrowed, upon which profits are low, which therefore ought to have its condition mended by transfer, but for which the word transfer can have no possible meaning but that of destruction.

Suppose, for a moment, which I do not believe, that free trade were really to inflict permanent injury on the shipping interest'. I do not believe it, though doubtless the personnel

1 At Newcastle, last year, I greatly admired the spirit of an eminent Protectionist ship-owner, who, grumbling like a true John Bull at the policy which he disliked, spent no time in praying to Jupiter, but was erecting in his dockyard a lofty and beautiful structure in the style of the Crystal Palace, simply to protect from the weather the hulls while on the stocks. Let me add, as more immediately illustrating the above argument, that I saw, at the same time, the iron-works of the firm in which Mr. Armstrong is the acting partner-one of those perfect industrial organizations in which man seems to rival the processes of Nature herself. Every varied

of our mercantile marine will require some improvement before it can hold its own with the intelligent supercargoes and captains of North America. But suppose the case of a ship-owner having really to transfer his capital, what is the meaning of the process? It means and can mean nothing but total ruin, a simple abandonment of the ships which are the capital to rot in the docks or at the river side. Of course a sale of the ships, though a transfer for the individual seller, is none in the sense of the argument, as it would still leave the same amount of capital in the unprofitable employment.

So of agricultural capital; what is the meaning of its transfer? It is true that crops, live stock, and draught cattle are always saleable, but what is to be done with the expensive manures or the drainage? How would Mr. Mechi transform his costly and admirable apparatus into something which could be applied to the extended manufacture of calico, or to the production of that which is now most of all in demand at the goldmines, namely, bitter ale and bottled porter? But we may suppose, in an ordinary case, that a farmer can extricate most part of his capital from his holding. When the fields are swept bare, and the auction of the old ancestral furniture is at an end— when he has taken his last look at those bare walls which rang with the joy of his bridal and witnessed the birth of his children, and after the mournful equipage has lingered by the gate of the old familiar churchyard where the bones of the elders repose-where is he to go for his new investment? To the cotton mills! To join in that fierce race of competition, in which the keenest man in England, without a Lancashire education or Lancashire blood in him, has not the remotest chance of holding his ground! In such a contest, the farmer's prospect of improving his profits would be slender indeed. For a man bred to agriculture, there is no transfer possible but a transfer out of

operation, from the most vast to the most delicate, was performed exactly in its place and in its time, without one wasteful movement of a muscle, and all by the aid of a judiciously invested capital. What would have been the meaning of transferring that capital? To fling it into the Tyne or sell it for old iron.

England. That may, in many cases, be a desirable measure; but when such is the meaning of the word, there should be no mistake about it.

Reasoning, therefore, involving this postulate of the transferability of capital, always requires to be closely watched in practice, to see how far it may affect that vast mass of capital which has assumed fixed forms in England, and which is moreover closely interlaced with the life-long habits of its owners, and of which the transfer means an inexpressible amount of suffering. For my own part, I must say, free trader as I am, now of twenty years standing-ever since those old exciting days of the Reform Bill, when I learned the principle from the racy catechism and essays of Colonel Thompson and the inimitable articles of the Examiner, and above all from the one conclusive argument of the monkeys at Exeter 'Changeif I thought to-morrow that any really large transfer of agricultural capital were impending, or could be averted by legislation, I would write, speak, and vote against a worse waste than the waste of the monkeys-the irreparable waste of human happiness.

Transfer of Labour.

With respect to the transfer of labour, the assumption that labour flows easily from the less profitable to the more profitable employments, so as to produce something like an equilibrium of wages for equal kinds of effort and sacrifice, must evidently be taken with a very large allowance for such actual differences, even in agricultural wages, as those brought together in the highly instructive work of Mr. Thornton on Over Population. Nay, the wide divergence between the scientific postulate and the stubborn fact is still more fully brought home to us by a map in Mr. Caird's new book on Agriculture, in which England appears actually separated by a line into the regions of high and low wages, with an average difference between them of 37 per cent. In other words, masses of the

population have been long festering in misery in the south, at some six or seven shillings of weekly earnings, whilst others have been at the same time obtaining nearly half as much again in the north, at the same kind of employments.

Another illustration of the difficulty which attends every transfer of labour was presented by a circumstance which occurred in 1836. At that time wages being high, and labour much wanted, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, it was thought that great advantage would accrue from removing thither a certain number of families from some of the pauperized districts of Norfolk and Suffolk. The plan had every possible recommendation. The increase of wages obtained by the families who migrated was immense. They were kindly received by the people of the districts in which they settled. Most of them considered the change like an entrance into paradise, and yet it required the whole energy of the Poor Law Commission, then at the height of its influence, to overcome the obstructions which stood in the way of transferring a few hundred families. Nor was this all; the first reverse which took place in manufacturing prosperity, though it did not drive away the bulk of the emigrants, yet produced discontent amongst many, and powerful organs in the press denounced the whole operation retrospectively as a scandalous contrivance for saving the rates in Suffolk, and placing cheap labour at the command of the capitalists.

A still more striking instance of the inveterate strength of the habits which oppose transition from one employment to another, appears in the large body of the hand-loom weavers. Notwithstanding the long period that has elapsed since the depression of their wages, you may still go any day into Spitalfields and see one of these men, who, from his infancy, has been steeped in privation, and who yet not only does not change to a new employment himself--for the gnarled trunk will not readily assume a new inflexion—but is resolved to bequeath his inheritance of wretchedness, by condemning his innocent child to that loom over which he has so often bowed his own