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suddenly out of space into the other world or other no-world by pistol-shot, how were it? ...

So had it lasted, as in bitter protracted death-agony through long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring half audibly, recited Faust's death-song, that wild Selig der, den er im Siegesglanze findet, Happy whom he finds in battle's splendour, and thought that of this last friend even I was not forsaken, that destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of man or devil; nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing could the arch-devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual indefinite pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous apprehension of I knew not what. It seemed as if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me; as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I palpitating waited to be devoured. Full of such humour was I one sultry dogday after much perambulation toiling along the dirty little Rue St. Thomas de l'Enfer in a close atmosphere and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when all at once there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: 'What art thou afraid of? wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the devil and man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart? canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then, and I will meet it and defy it.' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul, and I shook base fear away from me for ever. I was strong; of unknown strength; a spirit; almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed; not fear or whining sorrow was it, but indignation and grim fire-eyed defiance.

Thus had the everlasting No (das ewige Nein') pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my ME; and then it was that my whole ME stood up in native god-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its protest. Such a protest, the most important transaction in my life, may that same indignation and defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The everlasting No had said: Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the universe is mine (the devil's); to which my whole ME now made answer; I am not thine but free, and for ever hate thee.

It is from this hour I incline to date my spiritual new birth: perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a man.

J. A. FROUde.

NEW MARKETS FOR BRITISH PRODUCE.

MR. ECROYD'S remarkable triumph at Preston, and the threats of the Bradford hands to Boycott' French goods, are distinct signs that people in England are awaking to the necessity of England's retaining access to markets outside the British Isles.

It is commonly acknowleged that since its adoption of the principles that now regulate its commercial policy, the English nation has enjoyed forty years of unexampled growth and prosperity. But what is not so often acknowledged is the equally important fact that the nation in this prosperous development has appropriated vast unoccupied tracts of the earth's surface; and that these appropriations, which, not many years ago, were penal settlements, struggling whaling stations, or distant trading factories, have now grown into communities, whose wealth, success, and importance already give them claim to take rank among the prominent nations of the earth.

This rapid growth of the oversea portion of our Empire is at the present moment silently but surely making its weight felt in the most important interests and works of the nation. Among them none holds so important a place as the interchange of the products of industry. Natural and human forces exist in so vast a variety of combinations that each country seems always able to supply to every other country some definite products at a profit; and it is on this natural exchange that the progress of the human race in prosperity seems to depend. These forces at present at work in England make us produce a large surplus of manufactures. And if we cannot sell this surplus our labour is in vain, and the product of our energy absolutely valueless. What we must have is access to markets. But if we sell in markets in other communities we can only do so by obtaining access on terms settled by these other communities, and often dictated by considerations which have but little relation to commercial or even to economic needs. The terms of this access in Holland not so long ago, and in France at the present moment, depend rather on the political strategy of ministries than on the economic advantages of the nations concerned.

And yet our export manufacturers are putting forth all their vigour to prevent a rise in the French tariff. Our whole manufacturing body

freely and liberally supports the efforts and expenses of our Foreign Office in its endeavours to keep low on the European continent the price of access to continental markets. England spares no effort and no expense to maintain this established custom.' But up to the present, England has paid only too little heed to a new 'custom,' springing up in unlooked-for directions, a new connection' which bids fair year by year to rival and to supplant this older connection. Probably few of our manufacturers are aware of the following recorded results :—

TABLE I.-Value of English manufactures exported to—

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TABLE II.-Value of total trade of United Kingdom with-

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* France, Belgium, Holland, and Sweden and Norway.

From these two tables we learn two lessons. The first is that our own colonies are growing into markets not only already equalling in magnitude the older established markets of other lands, but possessed of the further admirable attribute of unlimited future growth. Our trade with France dwindles and dwindles; our trade with our Australian Colonies by itself already equals our trade with France. With France we have no reasonable prospect of a larger trade, because France is fully peopled and fully developed. With Australia our prospects of increased trade are commensurate with the fact that in Australia we have a continent capable by its own inherent fertility of supporting in prosperity a population of 300,000,000 human beings, and at present yielding wealth to a bare three millions of human workers. We make every effort to secure access to the dwindling French market; we make no public or appreciable effort to secure access to this real market of the future' that invites us in Australia.

And what holds true of France and of Australia holds true of the whole of Europe contrasted with the whole of our Colonial Empire. In Europe we have a market old-established indeed, but in communities themselves fully developed, and moreover of natural and human forces very similar to those of our own islands. In our colonies we have all this new grand possibility of markets (of which we have an earnest in their present rapid growth) in communities differing essentially in the character of their natural and human forces; and therefore of far more certain value in the natural interchange of pro

ducts of industry and enterprise. The Australian continent is overrun to grow wool, but its sparse workers in such industries congregate only reluctantly with sufficient concentration to produce conditions favourable to the genesis of the industries that find favour with the close-packed population of these islands. The areas we occupy in the tropics, where white labour is impossible, can be our allies but never our rivals. They can supply us with cotton and with sugar. But it will require a new civilisation, a new order of mankind, to enable them to make for themselves machinery or even clothes on terms that can at all compete with the human vigour and the applicable mineral resources these islands possess.

Nor is it only of trade between England and the colonies that cognisance is being forced upon us. There exists also a rapidly growing inter-colonial commerce already of vast dimensions. The tonnage of the shipping employed in this trade alone already excels that of France and Germany added together. The great Australian tea-market is now being largely supplied from Ceylon and Assam. The very life of some of our West Indian colonies depends on the fact that ships bring them continual supplies of labour from India. As the British Empire grows, so is it proved that the mainspring of its prosperity is intercourse between its parts.

The second table supplies us with a second lesson, significantly witnessing to these things. We see in this table the recorded effect of commercial depression on our trade. The colonies record a protest, and no mean protest, in our own favour. During the four years of depression immediately succeeding to that notorious period of inflation culminating in the year 1873, we find our trade with our colonies continued to increase to the amount of 11 per cent.: we find our trade with foreign countries continued to decrease to the amount of 11 per cent. If we pay heed to it, we have here an invaluable hint as to the compensating influences resulting from width of area and diversity of forces, both natural and human, provided their individual energies contribute in mutual union.

The surface of the world, so far as Englishmen are concerned, is held by two classes of communities; the one class altogether independent one of another in sentiment and in kinship, and only held together in any kind of forbearing union by the selfish interests of each individual community. The second class is a whole made up of homogeneous parts bound to one another by the powerful ties of national character and sentiment, as well as by the selfish interests of each individual community. This former class presents a mere discrete agglomeration of foreign states; the latter class embraces the wide-spreading provinces of the British nation. The one class Englishmen seem to be able to affect only by the means of threats and destructive retaliation; the other class is directly ruled and controlled by Englishmen.

It needs to insist upon the strange fact, that while England is maintaining at great effort a precarious and utterly untrustworthy commercial connection with foreign states, the average public seems doggedly to shut its eyes to the opportunities afforded by England's extensive empire. It is true this unaccountable error disappears when we look to that main but silent current of industrial endeavour, which runs its course, fed by every streamlet and font of individual interest and enterprise in the true direction of success. This current has long ago recognised, that within the frontiers of its own empire the lively productive enterprise of the English race has plenty of scope for the profitable exercise of all its power: there are long years, long centuries of work, before these ample resources shall be, all of them, opened out. The Australias, by themselves, are equal in area, and in natural capacity, to the whole of Europe. In the Canadas and the districts of South Africa the English race possesses yet another potential Europe. And in India and the various outlying colonies the nation possesses surface and wealth of resources equalling those of Europe. The nation owns, then, an extent of surface and a variety of natural resources equal to three Europes conjoined. Here then we have a field not altogether insufficient for employing the best energies of a nation of 50,000,000 people, and for providing unlimited scope for an unlimited increase of this nation.

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Mr. Neufchatel in Endymion makes the appropriate and wise remark, We do not want measures; what we want is a new channel.' At the present moment our manufacturers and our exporters want for their relief not measures but new channels; and trade, if we look to figures, is endeavouring to carve for itself a new channel in the mutual supplying of our wide empire. The great engine to the successful development of a vast mine of rich natural endowments is assured freedom of exchange. Labour and capital, energy and enterprise, skill and abstinence—these bases of successful production must be assured their opportunities of exertion over this vast field. In such case, and in such case alone, there opens out for Englishmen a new future of signal prosperity.

But the fact is that though England enjoys free trade, Englishmen do not. There is free trade in Great Britain; there is free trade in the British Isles. But there exists also a greater Britain; there are British Isles, ay, and British continents, over the Atlantic and the Pacific, that at the present have not the assured advantage of free trade, and thus every moment run the risk of a relapse to the evils of fettered production and fettered exchange. It is undoubtedly true that the British Empire is, in itself, for the next century or so at all events, a complete world of production and consumption. But it is a world which does not at the present enjoy that true commercial union which insures freedom both of exchange and of production. And yet it is a world so circumstanced that it may, immedi

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