economy by abandoning the ground hitherto claimed by the leaders of that school for their method and doctrines. It is not many years since Mr. Lowe affirmed that 'political economy belongs to no nation, is of no country, and no power can change it.' Mr. Bagehot, on the contrary, emphatically limited the application of the postulates of the à priori and deductive method to England at its present commercial stage. And within this limit he further circumscribed and qualified what he termed 'the fundamental principle of English political economy,' by assuming only that there is a tendency, a tendency limited and contracted, but still a tendency, to an equality of profits through commerce.' Thus circumscribed, the principle can no longer serve as a foundation for the superstructure erected upon it, which is built on the assumption that the tendency is so effectual, and so arithmetically true and exact in its operation, that every shilling of cost to which every producer is put by any special tax or burden is nicely recovered, with neither more nor less than ordinary profit, in the market. Besides the essays referred to, and the numerous articles which he wrote in the Economist, Mr. Bagehot contributed to economic literature an excellent work on banking and the money-market, under the title of Lombard Street.' He was the author, also, of a work entitled Physics and Politics, which embodies a series of ingenious, though rather fragmentary, essays on the natural history of political society.

The work which displays in the highest degree both the original powers and some of the peculiar characteristics of Mr. Bagehot's mind is his English Constitution, which is unquestionably entitled to a place among English political classics. It is not without a tinge of cynicism, but it undoubtedly brings to light principles overlooked in all previous works on the Constitution, and which must be admitted by the disciples of Mr. Mill as qualifying to some extent the doctrines of that great writer's Representative Government. One of the curious practical contradictions, which, as Mr. Bagehot has pointed out, the political history of England gives to political theory, is that the £10 householders who, under the Reform Act of 1832, formed the bulk of the constituency were, above all classes, the

one most hardly treated in the imposition of taxes; so little did representation secure especial care for their interests.

Although of the Liberal party, Mr. Bagehot was, by disposition and cast of thought, what, for want of a more appropriate word, we must call an aristocrat in political opinion and feeling-a Whig, not a Radical. In his English Constitution he speaks of the order of nobility as useful, not only for what it creates, but for what it prevents, and in particular as preventing the absolute rule of gold, 'the natural idol of the Anglo-Saxon,' who is 'always trying to make money,' and who bows down before a great heap, and sneers as he passes a little heap.' If Mr. Bagehot did not himself bow down before the great heap, he was a little disposed to sneer at the little heap. Thus in 'Lombard Street,' speaking of the democratic structure of English commerce as preventing a long duration of families of great merchant princes, he says 'they are pushed out, so to say, by the dirty crowd of little men.' And in the discussions which arose out of the agitation for a reform of the Irish law of landlord and tenant, he could not conceal his scorn for little farms and little properties in land, such as form the main foundation of the prosperity of France.

Mr. Bagehot unsuccessfully sought at one time a seat in Parliament, but with all his political sagacity, knowledge, and talent, he was scarcely qualified to make a considerable figure in the House of Commons; for, although he might have made an administrator of a high order in a public office, he remarkably exemplified the essential difference between the qualifications of a writer and those of a speaker. The position that actually fell to him in life was the one he was best fitted for, and it was one really more honourable and more useful than that of many eminent members of Parliament.

XVIII.

THE RECLAMATION OF WASTE.

(Saturday Review, August 23, 1862.)

DR. TRENCH has remarked that among the changes which language undergoes in time, there is a perceptible tendency in words to lose their original moral significance. Words which once conveyed, as a portion of their meaning, the indignation or contempt of society, come to have a very mild tincture of either, or none at all. Dr. Trench traces this to the want of depth and strength in the moral sentiments of mankind, and of constancy and earnestness in their blame of sin and evil. They cease to be shocked at common vices and offences, and lightly take their names in vain until those names lose their reproach. Something of this kind has no doubt taken place in the usages of speech, but the phenomenon appears to have also another and brighter side. Among the causes that lift words out of degradation into an innocent and even a respectable position, there is one which the moralist may regard with satisfaction. The things denoted by words sometimes undergo a change for the better. They are divested of noxious and disagreeable qualities, and become useful members of society, and they are spoken of with different feelings accordingly. If they still bear their old names, these names cease to be hard names. This takes place in cases such as the reclamation of waste substances, the purification of offensive and unwholesome matter, the discovery of uses for hitherto neglected and worthless articles, and the actual improvement of the world and its inhabitants in the progress of civilization. A foreigner ceases to be in fact an enemy; a peasant is not now commonly a pagan, a boor, a churl, or a villain, and the name he retains is no longer one of reproach;

a Scot is not thought of in connexion with beggary, nor an Italian with treachery and cunning. Wild animals, once regarded with fear and hatred, have been domesticated, and other names are used in fondness. In like manner, if all matter could be put in its right place, or to its right use, a variety of terms for waste and dirt would either disappear from our Vocabulary altogether, or change their signification. There would be no such thing as weeds, rubbish, litter, refuse, offal, and dregs, in their present sense; and these words would either become obsolete, or get blended with different associations. Commerce and the useful arts have already accomplished changes of this sort to a considerable extent. Coal, for instance, was long in great disgrace as the name of a dirty and unwholesome fuel, unfit for household use-which in fact it was, while it filled the room with smoke and gas, for want of proper means of ventilation. Until rags had obtained a high commercial value, and so long as they were associated with repulsive forms. of human misery, their name, like themselves, could have no other than an ignominious position, out of which increased cleanliness and utility have been steadily raising it. So among the things of which paper can be made, Mr. Simmonds, in his 'Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances,' enumerates sugar-cane trash, silk, flax, and cotton waste, woollen refuse, beetroot refuse, shavings, leather scraps, cabbage stalks, thistles, and nettles, all of which are applicable to several other uses, and being no longer outlaws, vagabonds, and nuisances in the world, may become citizenized in its language.

Dr. Trench tells us that 'weeds were originally whatever covered the earth, or the person; while now, as respects the earth, those only are weeds which are noxious or wild; as regards the person, we speak of no other weeds but the widow's.' But it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the earth was once covered with weeds in the modern sense of the word, and that in time there will be no such thing as a weed in that sense. Our garden vegetables are all domesticated weeds or wild plants; so it is with our cereals. Darwin, indeed, asserts. that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilized man, has afforded us a

single plant worth cultivation. It is not, he adds, that these countries do not possess the original stocks of very useful plants, but that they have not been improved up to the standard of perfection required in civilized countries. There are, however, numerous wild plants which are at once available for human uses, without the long process of selection and nursing to which we owe our cauliflowers, turnips, potatoes, pears, apples, plums, grapes, and corn plants. We have had unmistakable warnings too, in the last few years, that we cannot afford to be dependent for the staples of our food and industry on any single place or production. The potato disease was one of those warnings. Yet though it should have come home to us more than to any other people, the French, as Mr. Simmonds observes, have been much more zealous in the search for edible roots. The war with Russia forced us to look for substitutes for some of the most important materials of our manufactures, for which we had been nearly dependent on that country. Mexican grass, for example, was forced to supply the place of bristles for many different kinds of brushes, and while equally strong and flexible, is much cheaper.

In dealing with the materials of our most important branches of industry, we seem to have often acted on the principle that a half is more than the whole, and have rejected, accordingly, as refuse, much useful substance. Mr. Simmonds has drawn attention to this in the case of cotton. A new manufacture has recently sprung up on the Continent, which is based on the principle of picking up the fragments that nothing may be lost, and which promises to yield an economical substitute for cotton in some of its uses, besides rendering other services to the world.

Had the Romans been in possession of Mr. Simmonds' book, it would have seemed to them singularly inappropriate to speak of 'inutilis alga,' for sea-weed seems to be convertible to more uses than even that pliant servant of mankind, gutta percha, which has itself been only twenty years in European business, having been first discovered at Singapore in 1842.

Even sources of national poverty are transformed by modern art into sources of national wealth. Mr. Goldwin Smith has