remarked that Ireland pays a heavy price for lakes and rivers, in having nearly a seventh of her area covered with bog. Mr. Simmonds, on the other hand, points to this extent of bog as a magazine of future wealth, and thinks it not too much to assume that peat tracts may become to Ireland what coal mines are to England.

It is in agriculture, however, that the metamorphoses of waste, refuse, and filth into useful and respectable substances are most remarkable. The problem of modern agriculture is one of prevention of waste. Until the present century, agriculture was another name for a gradual waste or exhaustion of the soil, and the towns were in fact ruining the country. But we learn from chemistry that none of the materials of the soil need be lost. Indeed, Liebig seems to grudge the phosphate lost by the burial of bones, but we could afford that solemn item in our national expenditure, were we to be guided by Mr. Simmonds' advice respecting the waste products of our fisheries.

There is one reclaimable waste to which Mr. Simmonds has not adverted, and that is the waste of intellect. It was one of Coleridge's sayings, that every true science bears in itself the seeds of a cognate profession, and the more trades are elevated into professions the better.' In France this truth has been for many years appreciated. And whoever considers, on the one hand, the overcrowded state of our learned professions, and, on the other, the abundant room for scientific ability in numerous branches of manufacture and production, can hardly deny that a great waste of English intellect might be saved, and that an immense addition to our national resources might be effected by the elevation, on the shoulders of science, of various common occupations into skilful professions.

[*.* The discovery of the new gold mines, the colonization of new countries, and the development of their resources, metallic and non-metallic, are examples of the reclamation of waste on a grand scale in the present age. The same process is discernible likewise in the development of hitherto neglected

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advantages and capabilities in old countries, and the consequent rise in the money value of their labour and produce. The reader will discover many applications of the principle in the six next essays. But as the first of the six essays-on British Columbia-shows, the development of a new country may follow a very different course from what at first sight might be anticipated.]

UNIVERSITY

CALIFORNIA

XIX.

BRITISH COLUMBIA IN 1862.

(Saturday Review, October 25, 1862.)

OUR most distant North American colonies, British Columbia and Vancouver Island, move in a course the very reverse of what Adam Smith has called the natural progress of opulence. He argues that as subsistence is necessarily prior to comfort and luxury, the cultivation and improvement of the country must, in the nature of things, precede the growth of towns, and the greater part of the capital of a rising community must be first directed to agriculture, next to manufacture, and last of all to foreign commerce. This necessary order of things is also, he observes, in conformity with the natural inclinations of mankind; agriculture being the pleasantest of all occupations, and being unattended with the risks of trade. From these premisses the philosopher concludes that if human institutions had not thwarted nature, the towns would nowhere have increased beyond what the improvement and cultivation of the territory in which they were situated could support, until the whole of that territory was completely cultivated. But he points out that this natural order of progress was inverted in the growth of all the States of Europe after the dissolution of the Roman Empire.

The foreign commerce of these cities introduced all their fine manufactures, and manufactures and commerce together gave birth to the principal improvements of agriculture. The causes which forced the different countries of Europe into the unnatural and retrograde order' are investigated in the Third Book of the Wealth of Nations; and the explanation amounts in brief to this, that the medieval laws and customs affecting the

ownership and tenure of land discouraged agriculture, while the inhabitants of towns arrived at independence and liberty much earlier than the occupiers of the soil.

But how are we to account for the phenomenon that the youngest colonies of Great Britain in North America are following the same paths of progress as the feudal States of the Middle Ages? The very first consequence of the rush to the mines of British Columbia in 1858 was to create the flourishing town of Victoria in Vancouver Island, which before was merely a factory of the Hudson Bay Company. On the mainland, the less populous and less prosperous town of New Westminster, the capital of British Columbia, grew up, between which and the mining districts are now several smaller towns. All these towns are purely commercial. In Vancouver Island agriculture is still in its infancy. In British Columbia it can hardly be said to exist as yet. In the latter the colonial population, as distinct from the native Indian tribes, consists almost exclusively of miners, shopkeepers, carriers, or packers, town and road labourers, and military and civil officials-the mining element largely preponderating during the mining season. Some time ago the Victoria 'Daily British Colonist,' a sensibly written but villainously printed paper, observed:-The town and country begin to swarm with men, most of them inured to labour. The majority are, perhaps, better acquainted with agriculture than with any other art. Yet all profess to be bound for Cariboo. Agriculture seems never to be taken into account.' This is a state of things not only irreconcileable, in appearance at least, with Adam Smith's doctrine, but diametrically opposed to the precepts of a yet more famous philosopher respecting a colonial community. The people wherewith you plant,' according to Lord Bacon, ought to be gardeners, labourers, smiths, carpenters, joiners, fishermen, fowlers, with some few apothecaries, engineers, cooks and bakers. But,' he adds, moil not too much underground, for the hope of mines is uncertain, and useth to make the planters lazy in other things.'

Were there no land fit for either pasture or tillage in British Columbia, it would be needless to say anything more about

the cause of the backwardness of agriculture. No one now disputes that Vancouver Island possesses, in addition to a climate closely resembling that of England, several rich tracts of arable and pasture land, which are however only beginning to be settled. But as to the agricultural capabilities of British Columbia, there has been some controversy, which appears to have arisen from a confusion between the coast and inland districts. In the former, mountains and forests predominate, but the mines are all in the interior, and beyond the range of the Cascade Mountains. There is abundant room for a large farming population. In the country of the Thompson, the Bonaparte, and the Pavilion rivers, for example, as well as in that of the Similkameen and of the O'Kanagan Lake, there are great tracts of excellent land. The soil and climate are not the obstacles to the growth of agriculture in British Columbia. The traveller there may indeed be reminded of the gloomy horrors of those matted woods where birds forget to sing,' to which the exiles from the Deserted Village were driven; but we have unquestionable evidence that between the Thompson and the Quesnelle rivers there are vast undulating table lands where there is not more than sufficient wood for the settlers' requirements. The traveller, for instance, from Kamloops may canter his horse for days without a check from the nature of the ground, turning him out to grass at night. Such being the capabilities of this country, the British Colonist impresses upon its readers that there is a way in which a fortune can be made in British Columbia without breasting the snow on the hills or packing beans and bacon on their backs from creek to creek in Cariboo:-'That way is simply by taking farms on the road to Cariboo. That way is by raising hay, oats, wheat, potatoes, beans, pork, beef, and mutton. These are the commodities that can be most easily exchanged for gold. There is not a country under the face of heaven that now offers such brilliant inducements to the farmer as British Columbia.'

How is it then that such brilliant inducements have been held out in vain if they exist? Is it simply an instance of the truth of Bacon's observation, that the hope of mines useth to make the planters lazy in other things? Or is there any