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down her poverty and rascaldom on colonial shores, to the increase of a pauper class already threatening to make itself visible, and to the diminution of the current rate of wages, and the lowering of the existing state of comfort. Possibly, if a plan could be considered on both sides of the world which, while depleting the English labor market at home, should run no risk of overcrowding the Colonics, it might, by a joint and willing effort, be made to serve a double purpose.

Suppose, to begin with, that the Government of New Zealand could be induced to appoint an emigration committee. I choose New Zealand because I am inclined to think that opposition there would be less angry and rooted than elsewhere. Imagine the committee seated in London with ample powers to inquire into the physique, history, and general status of every person who was presented as a candidate for the advantages of the scheme. Let it be understood that only "live" men, as the Americans say, should be appointed to sit on the committee, and that they should do their duty. This would of course preclude all possibility of the deportation of undesirable people. Suppose further that, when once the cominittee has been formed, but before the necessity has arrived for it to enter on its labors, the New Zealand Government should appoint a surveyor to choose a district as yet un. opened, and that, this being done, roadmakers and the men required for the first rough work of clearing should be despatched from England. The plan would, of course, have to be matured carefully beforehand in most of its details, but for the present it is enough roughly to indicate its general lines. The roadmakers and clearers would have to be accompanied by a carefully allotted number of teamsters, wheelwrights, smiths, and carpenters. In a while, an architect, builders, bricklayers, and other handicraftsmen would follow. Villages would be planned and built, and the whole appurtenances of a thriving settlement would have to be provided schools, places of worship, shops, or, if it were better thought of, one general co-operative store, and to each of these as they grew, and only as they grew, the chosen emigrants would be carried. Behold in time, and in no great length of time, a settlement of British bone, and brain, and sinew, on land at

present lying waste and useless. The hub of the design is that there shall be no haste about it, and that no creature shall be deported until his presence on the settlement is needed, until his place is prepared for him.

All this will take money. How is the money to be found without overburdening a revenue already sufficiently surcharged with liabilities? Thus. The New Zealand Government might make over, for the time being only, the actual proprietorship of the plots selected. Holding this security, the home Government could advance all necessary financial aid. The settlers might pay such a rental as shall be calculated to repay the original outlay and its interest, say in twenty years. At the expiry of that time the settler should enter on the fee simple of the soil, and the British Government should relinquish its claim upon it. By this means, at only a temporary cost, the settlement would have been founded and the emigrants would be placed in possession of a cheap and valuable freehold. The new country would have within her boundaries a yeoman population of the utmost value.

The scheme could be worked continuously. The selector would be always ahead of the makers of roads and the clearers of the land. They, in their turn, would always be ahead of architects, builders, and handicraftsmen. The selection committee would sit en permanence. The influx would be graded, and would serve as a constantly increasing stimulus to existing manufactures and trades. The beginnings might be made on a small scale, and as the experiment was found to answer the motion might be accelerated until such time as the land subjected to this peaceful and beneficent invasion should "Hold !" cry

New Zealand has at present, roughly speaking, the land of Great Britain and the population of Glasgow. By force of climate she is marked out as the home of such characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race as we are specially proud to call "British." She will rise to greatness in one way or another, and by the adoption of some such method as is here suggested she might accelerate her rise. If Australia could any how be persuaded to adopt snch a method of increasing her population and developing her resources the question of an overcrowded labor market both for her

self and England might be staved off for a thousand years, by which time, it is to be humbly hoped, the collective wisdom of the world will have discovered some way of escape from the countless unintentioned wrongs which society inflicts upon the greater number of its members. The world is not ill-hearted, and needs but to learn how to be comfortable. Unless many men and books do lie, there is a million or so of square miles in Australia, at present incapable of supporting a creature, which might, by human effort, be made to flourish like a garden. We who write and read to-day will not live to see it, but the marvellous underground rivers will be tapped, and blessing will be poured upon a thirsty land. The secret is known already, and scattered enterprise is gathering wealth from it in many places. It will be by no means surprising, at this time of day, if even that alleged oversweetness of some of the Australian underground streams, which has so far made their waters barren of blessing, should some day be corrected by the aid of sci

ence.

I have dared to be outspoken, and here and there I have little hope that I have escaped offence. But I have never doubted the future of the Antipodean Colonies. They will leave us sooner or later, but they will leave us only to come back again, as America is already doing in sentiment and in fact. The good American loves England and honors its history and achievements. He represents the elder son of the family, and quarrelled rightly with the Mother Country when she chose to be in a most querulous and unjust humor. He is coming back to his allegiance now, not because he is any wiser, but because the old land has learned its lesson. When the great Continent of the South, and the distant islands which will one day nurture its strongest, manliest, and most essentially English race, have grown to the same height of manhood, they too will return. They have not left us yet, and when they do, as they inevitably will, it will be as much the fault of English carelessness and English official blundering as of Australian vanity and courage. But they will return, and the end of it will be that the two great children of England, Antipodean and American, will form a compact with the old lady who bore them both and sent them forth into the world. There is no

brag in it. The history of a thousand years has declared the fact. The AngloSaxon English-speaking race is the salt of the earth. Its whole tendency has been upward toward the divine ideal of all great minds. It dominates the world at this hour. Should it federate to-morrow, it could police the planet, and bid wars to end. It will join hands one day, but union will follow dissension.

Here to wind up with-is a mere set of verses which roughly expresses my mind. The suggested title is "A Possible Colloquy," and I dedicate the lines to the members of the Australian Natives Association-the gentlemen who desire to "cut the painter" and sail away from the dear old land:

"The lanky lad, as vain as shy,
And full of inward strife
Regards, with half defiant eye,
The author of his life.

He knows, or thinks he knows, his plan,
Dictation drives him mad;

He'll take no chaff from any man,

And least of all from Dad!

"Confound the patronizing tone

These worrying oldsters use ! We're big enough to stand alone, Six feet without our shoes. Thump! There's a manly pectoral swell! And feel the heart below! And as for sage experience-well We'll gain that as we go.

"Each dog his day. The turn is ours, Australia takes her fling!

You think to tie these growing powers
To any apron string?

Who but a peddling time-worn fool
Would prison thews and brain
Like these in any old dame school
With any hope of gain ?''

"We part, hot heart? Well, well. Good day.

How could I be your foe?
Dear lad, go on your prosperous way,
God with you as you go.
And whether you may hate or praise
The cast-off father's name,
One thing I know-in all your days
You'll never bring it shame.

"Your heart is of that stalwart stuff

That pulses Britain's blood; The mould's the same old rough and tough, No better, yet as good.

Go! Live your day and have your fling,
And when you're fully grown

I think your British heart will bring
The wanderer to his own.

"No blame. Not half a word of blame : No wrong, or thought of wrong:

:

This only choose your boyhood's aim
High, since your arm is strong.
Your head will counter in the dark
On many a solid wall;

And many an arrow seek its mark
And fail to reach and fall.

"Though strength and youth and hope conspire To animate your soul,

Your heart may droop, your feet may tire
Before you reach your goal.
But Wilful must, if Wilful will ;
God bless you, lad; good-bye.
At least we're son and father still,
And must be till I die."'

-Contemporary Review.

THE REFLEX EFFECT OF ASIATIC IDEAS.

Ir is a quarter of a century ago since the present writer observed in the Spectator, when commenting on some fresh triumph of the mail service, that the increase of communication between Europe and Asia might produce unexpected results. We all think of it as increasing the intellectual grip of Europe on Asia, but it must also facilitate the reflex action of Asiatic ideas on Europe. They poured back on us in a flood during the Crusades; and why should they not pour again, to affect us once more, either, as Christianity did, by conversion, or, as Mohammedanism did, by recoil? The prophecy has not hitherto been accomplished. The dividing barrier between the thoughts of the East and the West has proved tenacious, and though, to the surprise of inankind, Oriental art has made a capture of the European mind, so that Asiatic coloring and Asiatic decoration have permanently affected all Western eyes, the special thoughts of the East have made little visible impression. We fancy, however, that the barrier is cracking. By far the most startling fact in the biography of Laurence Oliphant was the proof it afforded that Western minds-for Oliphant was not alone could accept and act on a leading Asiatic idea, that if a man could utterly dominate self, and make the body a completely passive agent of the will, he would wrest from Heaven, or Fate, or the Universum, whichever it was, powers transcending those known from experience to be possessed by human beings. The possessor of those powers could convert the world without the slow methods of persuasion, perhaps enter into relation with beings before whose wisdom that of men is ignorant foolishness. That was the governing hope which impelled Laurence Oliphant to his strange life, with its victory, as he thought, over the flesh; and it will, by and by, probably impel

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much stronger natures than his. prize is so enormous, so entirely transcending any usual reward for effort, that the minds which can accept its possibility will be strongly moved to the attempt, and will waste years in an experiment which, though so often made, and sometimes made successfully-for there are faqueers and sunyasees and Buddhist devotees who have conquered the body-has never yet produced a spark of result in supernormal power. Fortunately, those who try it will be few, for the Western mind, unlike the Eastern, can never be quite dominated by an idea, and always applies to it some test which, in the case of a theory like selfsuppression, is sure, sooner or later, to be fatal. We shall see, however, a few trials, witness the rise of some strange sects, and probably see a large diffusion of that Eastern idea, the presence of the allpervading universal spirit in all things, good, evil, and indifferent, which, if Mr. J. A. Symonds is a sound critic, is the governing thought, indeed the sole thought, of Walt Whitman, and which his critic also believes to be of the essence of democracy. It will liquefy morals if it comes, and drive back civilization, so far as civilization is dependent on a discipline. of restraints; but come it will in places, with its correlative, that all material things, bad, good, and indifferent, if placed in an intense light, are essentially evil. both ideas filling Russian literature even now, and the thought of the Slav, which differs from all other thought in Europe by instantly producing act, as thought does in children, has a great part yet to play in moulding the West.

You see

So has Buddhist thought. All that stuff about Mahatmas is rubbish, unsupported by a trace of evidence, a merely stupid expression of the desire of so many minds for guidance either incapable of error, or less capable than the guidance of

ordinary beings; but the Mahatma notion is a mere excrescence on a creed which has a big thought embedded in it. We were surprised to perceive that both the French Buddhists, and the English as represented by Mrs. Besant, avowed a belief in the doctrine of transmigration, or, as the latter prefers to call it, of reincarnations. To most Englishmen, that idea, which in one way or another dominates the whole of non-Mussulman Asia, even that comparatively small section of the Chinese which is capable of rising above pure secularism, has a slightly comic effect, derived, we fancy, chiefly from an impression that to become an animal-which could only be a result of continuous degradation would be an absurdity. The doctrine, however, as really held in Asia, has an astonishing charm for some subtle minds, and especially for those which are never content to await future solutions to the great perplexities of the world. It does explain the inexplicable, and reconcile man, not indeed to his destiny, but to his position in the world. The whole notion of an injustice inherent in the scheme of the universe disappears at once, and all that endless problem why some, perhaps innocent, suffer, and some, perhaps guilty, enjoy. There is no injustice if this life is but a link in a long chain of past as well as future lives, and the millionaire is being rewarded for bis past careers, and the pauper punished for his. Suffering, under that theory, is but expiation for your own forgotten crimes, and will be fully repaid by the cleanliness in which you will enter on the next stage, while enjoyment is but reward, moderated by its concomitant, the temptation to let the flesh win again, and so recommence the round. Nor is equality possible, or inequality unjust, when grade is a sign of the favor won from the All, and the Prince is reaping reward, and the night soilman paying the penalty for the deeds of previous existence. There is not a particle of evidence for the hypothesis, which has against it, in a philosophic sense, the want of purpose in the total of existence; but it does explain the visible phenomena, and that in so modern a way that nothing would surprise us less than to see it adopted by great crowds who, in their passion of pity, accuse God of oppression because he suffers unearned pain to exist among mankind. Why should a child which has

done nothing have epilepsy? That is the perpetual half-formulated query of modern philanthropy; and Buddhism, which leaves the greatest problems unsolvedfor instance, the use of the universe, which under its theory, is an ever-revolving circle of inutilities springing from the All and reabsorbed into it-does resolve the problem which for a moment, when the imagination of men has, as it were, become raw, presses sharply upon the excoriation. The theory rebuilds content with the universe, and gets rid of puzzledom; and but for something in the average white mind which rejects it, because, we fancy, it suggests such inconceivable waste, a whole universe gyrating like a dancing dervish to no end, it might become one of the prevalent creeds of Europe. It is consistent with the effort to be good, yet explains suffering and imposes perfect resignation,-a_great_comfort to the majority who suffer. have its career, too, if faith in a personal God dies out, for humanity will always explore the whence and whither; and if the ultimate cause is either universal and eternal matter, or intangible and undesigning spirit, the central thought of Buddhism is as good an explanation as man is likely to forge. There will come a time, too, when the great experiment of democ racy has failed, as it probably will fail with unexpected rapidity; when men will ask the reason of the failure, and many of them will find it in the contradiction between the idea of equality and the instinctive sense of justice which at least assigns a superior reward to the good. Buddhism does do that.

It will

We wonder if the worst idea of Asia, that morality has no immutable basis, but is a fluctuating law dependent upon some inexplicable relation between the individual and the Creator, or the individual and the All, will ever come over here. The Indian holds that a line of conduct may be right for one man, or indeed imperative, but wrong for another, or indeed insufferable; that a world-wide law is unthinkable; and that each man will be judged because of his obedience to some law external to himself, yet peculiar to his own personality. The King's obligation to the divine is not the peasant's; the ordinary Brahmin must be monogamous, while the Koolin Brahmin may have sixty wives; the trader may cheat

where the carrier must keep contract; the usual Hindoo must spare life, while the Thug may take it and yet remain sinless. That opinion subverts the very foundations of morality and conduct; yet there are subtle minds that hold it, and Europe once showed a curious tendency in the same direction. Different moral laws were held to bind different classes, a notion still surviving and active whenever the conduct of clergymen is called in question. We have never been able to trace the genesis of that notion, which has been, as it were, intercalated into Hindooism, and suspect it of not being a religious idea at all, but one born of convenience and allowed a religious sanction, because a non-religious idea, an idea which is useful and received, yet excepted from divine sanction, is impossible to the Hindoo mind. Nothing can be tolerable and yet outside that system. We have little fear of the idea in Europe, which recoils from it more and more, tending always toward equality, at least in fetters, be they for good or evil; but we have some apprehension of the last Asiatic idea, which we shall mention as likely to be imported. This is the notion of man's irresponsibility for anything but his individual conduct, for the general system of things as it exists around him. That, says and thinks the Asiatic, is the work of superior powers, and no more to be modified than the procession of the seasons; and but that human nature is weak, he would no more resist it than a true Mussulman would effect an insurance on his ship. The submissiveness of Asia to evils that could be remedied springs ultimately from that, and is because of that nearly incurable. The genuine Asiatic, uncorrupted by white teaching, considers that which is as the will of God, and leaves it to him to alter. Why put a lightningconductor by the Mosque? God, if he

pleases, can take care of his own; and if he does not please, of what use to try and thwart his will? The Mussulman avowedly holds that theory, but there is not an Asiatic free of it, even the strong-willed Chinaman yielding to it almost, though not quite entirely. The combative energy of the European, who when roused to consciousness will put up with nothing, and who has the stimulus of living on a conti. nent in which the powers of Nature are comparatively feeble, has kept him from this soporific belief; but take away from him a little hope-and the resistless strength of democracy may take some away, as it is doing from Americans--or increase by a little his impression that "God has no need of human aid"-an impression of all the more rigid Calvinists and Quakers-and he would sink back, reluctantly but certainly, to the submissiveness of Asia, amid which it is felt to be wrong even to lament the flood when superior forces made the waters swell. We shall not see it in our time, for the energy of the white races, whose reign is comparatively new, is still unexhausted, and they have the spirit of the Titans, who thought even Olympus might be stormed; but there are times when ideas which soothe are readily received, and ideas which are readily received are terribly strong. The dream of the right of all men to everything they want, which is a mere thought unsupported by evidence, or rather, denied by the ever-present evidence that the earth yields food only in return for hunan sweat, and that every human being lives under sentence of capital punishment, is already shaking the very foundations of European society. Thought is stronger than armies, even when it is as baseless as the main thought of the Buddhist creed.-Spectator.

THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN.*

BY FREDERIC HARRISON.

To those of us meeting here, on the thirty-fourth anniversary of his death, who knew Auguste Comte in life and have

made his teaching the work of our lives, he is neither infallible authority and unique prophet on the one hand, nor, on the other, is he merely a great thinker and To us September, the anniversary of the death of founder of a school of philosophy. Auguste Comte he is really the founder of a Religion: but

* An address given at Newton Hall, on 5th

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