very easy for the gentleman, amid his grapes and walnuts, sipping his wine in his cosy dining-room or at his club, to talk of Dunkin Bills for his poor neighbour, and vote away his glass of beer! Is it not class legislation practically? We commend that Government which restrains its unruly citizens; but what are we to think of a Government, which, not content with moderating the wild passions and keeping them within decent bounds, actually turns on every useful and self-controlled member of society, and puts an embargo on his innocent pleasures, robbing him of those small comforts and satisfactions which help to break the strain of his, too often, hard and cheerless lot. The bow that is bent too far and too constantly, snaps at last ; and opium and other worse stimulants may be had recourse to, if, in our overstrained requirements, we demand too much. But the whole course of human legislation is opposed to the belief that so harsh and Draconian a law could ever, practically, be enforced a law more stringent in this particular than the requirements of Christianity itself, and which, though advocated by Christians on so-called Christian principles, if obeyed to the letter, supersedes the very command of Christ himself. I see that there are some gentlemen actively engaged in promoting this system of interference with human liberty, from whose intellects I had hoped for better things; but it is astonishing to what an extent the emotions often override the judgment.

FIDELIS was a strong and ardent supporter of the Dunkin Bill, when proposed in Kingston, where the good sense of the community (and much else not so good) prevented its adoption. But can any place be found in which it has proved a plain, unequivocal success. I have not heard of any. Ône man did say to me that he thought it had done good in a certain neighbourhood. This is the sole testimony I have had in its favour; though I have heard and read much which told terribly against it. But in the incorporated village of Portsmouth, near which I reside, I made it my business to ascertain how it worked, and the universal testimony, including that of most respectable advocates of the measure, was that it had effected no good at all, while the testimony of some of them was, that the

state of things was worse than before the passing of the Bill.

Of the effect of the Maine Liquor law in the State of Maine, I have heard the most conflicting testimony. But in the Mail I read that Mr. Dodds read an extract from the Portland (State of Maine) Argus, showing that, since the passage of the Maine Liquor Law, the population of the State had stood still, while the amount of crime had increased, and the State Prison had been enlarged four times in nine years, during which time also no less than twentyfive amendments had been made in the Maine Liquor Law.'

A short time since a clergyman was staying with me, and hearing that some years before he had been in the State of Maine for six weeks, I asked him what he knew of the effect of the Maine Liquor law there. His reply was, that there was more drunkenness there than he had ever witnessed in any village of Canada of the same population. But fearing that I might have made a possible mistake, I wrote to him on the subject, and received by post his answer in somewhat stronger terms than those I have above employed. And he added, 'there was no difficulty in getting liquor, only it was of inferior quality and dearer than in Canada. . . . . It was sold in neighbouring villages in the same way.' This testimony is unimpeachable.

Thus, one after the other, have English Permissive Bills, Gothenburg systems, Maine Liquor Laws, Dunkin Bills all proved failures, because the fundamental principles of morality and of human nature have been utterly ignored and despotically trampled on. And surely it must strike the Christian advocates of prohibitory laws as singular and stumbling, that, throughout the whole course of the Dispensations, neither Patriarchs, nor Lawgivers, nor Prophets, nor Apostles, nor the Founder of their Faith, ever dreamt of such a system-a system which is wholly subversive of our simplest ideas of the principles on which they acted and by which they were actuated, and that one of their greatest difficulties to-day lies in the precepts and practice of Christ himself, against which all their arguments break and recoil upon them, like the baffled waves of the ocean against the granite cliffs.

But is there no remedy? None but

'the relentless forces of Nature,' eliminating the weak, and the general prevalence of truer and higher principles, and a different and higher teaching, and-time.

But if our children see their parents frequent the bar-room and the saloon; if parents show that they think it mean not to treat and be treated, in hotels and in their private houses; if it is thought hospitable or gentlemanly to offer every one who enters something to drink ;-is it any wonder that our children drop insensibly into our habits, regard the taking of liquor as a mark of good-fellowship and manliness, and imitate their parents, till, before they are hardly aware of it, the occasional action has grown into a habit, and the habit into a disease; till, at length, the nerve-element has become physically involved and the case is next to hopeless, and many a noble nature is lost for ever to the world.

If young men are not taught—oh, that we had some of those old Persian schools and that grand old schoolmaster !—that uncontrol, instead of being masterful and manly and the sign of a high spirit, is, in very deed, the proof of a very feeble and degenerate and unmanly nature-only the man-form of one who has thrown up the reins of the will into the keeping of the passions, and who is, therefore, only the poor weakling and buffet of every momentary caprice, and not a man at all; and if parents, hurrying along and absorbed by schemes of wealth and ambition, and inculcating unconsciously, by their words and actions, very questionable principles, abandon their children to others to be educated -no, not educated, but-to be taught languages in schools in which the selfish ambition of the parents is re-ingrafted and

fostered in the children;-can we wonder at the result.

If it slips out at every turn that riches and position are the one thing worth pursuing in the race of life, and that mental and moral wealth, if not for the sake of display, are not worth the seeking; if high and sustained excitement, which means wasted nerves, be the order of the day in everything; then it is no wonder if men-and women are to blame for much of this-seek in stimulants the momentary arrest of that decay of nerve element which, in many cases, is so great and so sudden that the loss cannot be made up by the ordinary processes of the constitution through the assimilated food. To all such, the experiment is fraught with the extreme hazard of (physical) nerve-degeneration. But still the cry is Hurry up.' The disappointed, too, to drown their disappointment, which, on its physical side, means likewise wasted nerve-matter, take to the stimulant to drown their disappointment. And here again I say, oh, that we had our wise Persian schoolmaster to teach us to be wise!

But this question of a remedy is a long one, on which I have scarcely begun. Still I must close abruptly or weary my readers beyond endurance.

In parting, however, let me again urge, especially on our young men, that one of the greatest duties in life is this, 'to guard the individual of whatever grade against trespasses upon his individuality. Let their motto in every campaign be-Pure principles, not probable consequences-then, as the sweet singer says,

'Si fractus illabatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinæ.'

J. A. ALLEN.

WHEN the history of colonization

comes to be written, what a vast subject will the poet-historian find at his disposal! Setting apart those merely fanciful illustrations and parallelisms which a divine of the old school would have worked out as an overture to his theme, there will yet be many broad-searching and deepdelving roots to be traced out in all directions, hidden beneath the mould and decaying leaves of the vanished years. It would be a waste of time to suggest that the creation itself was a colonization, and Adam the pioneer' of the race, brought hither he knew not whence, it matters not whether from the medieval limbo of souls not yet endued with clay, or, according to Sir W. Thompson's more modern theory, carried along, potentially, on some mosscovered fragment of aerolite.

Poets have sung that

'Though inland far we be Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither,'

and seem thus to countenance the idea that the human race are immigrants on a large scale, having replaced the original apes by sheer force of numbers and organization.

But apart from all this, it is undoubtedly a fact that colonization, properly speaking, has played a most important part in the world's history. What were most of the early historical wars but the outcome of the emigrating instinct under unfavourable circumstances? Migratory Arabs driving their flocks and herds to browse upon their neighbours' more or less defined sheep-runs and cattle limits, or again, hurling their thousands under Caled, the sword of God, upon effeminate Greek or degraded Roman.

The old must give way to the young, nations like men, and men like leaves;' and the swarming of the Northern hive' is a sufficiently correct by-word to describe those warlike colonizations of Goths and Huns, from which seed-bed modern Europe has sprung.

New religions have been great fosterers of colonization, not only after the Mahometan manner, sending out its apostles on proselytising aims intent, but in the Christian style also, which very effectively inoculated heathen Europe with new blood and new ideas from well defined missionary centres of immigration, the cell of the recluse often becoming the nucleus of a regular nest of foreign monks and ecclesiastics. And later on, too, the inevitable clashing between opposing faiths has acted as a powerful centrifugal force, driving your Huguenots from France, and drawing your Puritans from England, with much energy and almost incalculable results. All these phases of the question, and many more which I must leave untouched, will be treated upon by the future Gibbon or Macaulay who will take up the subject, thankful that there yet remains a theme so vitally interesting and so capable of picturesque treatment and yet comparatively untouched upon by previous writers. When this work is written, as some day it will be, the materials I propose to bring forward in this paper may be found useful in elaborating one small niche, as it were, in the entire memorial edifice, one storied window in that grand series which will fitly depict the outward manifestations of the migratory instincts of our race.

Juvenile emigration is an essentially recent idea, one of the most purely modern plans than can be conceived. It presupposes a high state of civilization, not only in the terminus a quo, but also in the terminus ad quem, and lavish material appliances to overcome the labour of transit. Not only does it require this civilization to supply the means in cash and philanthropy, without which the money would prove inert metallic tokens, but it also, alas, postulates the existence of a degrading, crushing poverty at the starting point. For it need hardly be said that only the most biting misery could supply the numbers that have swollen the ranks of infant emigrants; like emigrants who leave their native land.

without any accompanying friends, such children must be paupers. It is not so much that distress and suffering loosen the natural bond of love between parent and child, though that is the case too often, but that the want and pauperism among the great cities of the old world crush out the lives of the parents by hundreds, or force a desertion crueller than the separation of death itself.

Out of some 1100 children and upwards who passed through the hands of Miss Rye (to whose work, as she has been the pioneer of this movement, I shall chiefly allude) up to the year 1874, about one-half may be set down as orphans. Between three and four hundred of the other half are set down in the returns as deserted by one or both parents, or in that worse than deserted condition in which the unnatural parent represents no longer the loving and tender guardian, but has rather become the harsh task-master of the child in iniquity and heavy labor. In this class too are comprised those whose surviving parent is in gaol, or in some asylum or institution which practically isolates the child from its father or mother. The remainder of the tale is made up by those of whom the parentage is unknown, either from the neglect of the workhouse authorities or by reason of the double cloud that illegitimacy has thrown around their antecedents.

Of these it may be safely surmised that those who are orphans are the most happy, for they may have known a parent's care, whilst the others, unheeded from the sad beginning of their lives, cannot even be said to be deserted, which would imply that they had once had homes and friends of their

ing incredible to the inhabitants of a country practically without a pauper class and actually without poor laws and poor-houses. Of course isolated cases of poverty and want occur too often even here, but no one who has not seen the evil in all its repulsive details could picture the hopeless, abject misery of a pauperised family or group of families,—as shiftless in anything beyond mere hand-to-mouth appliances as mere babies, as destitute of moral fibre as blotting paper is of material fibre, and without the faintest shadow of a chance to raise themselves without extraneous assistance. For such as these the unions and workhouses of England are the habitual home, the master and matron are their tutelary deities, their feeble remnants of independence and free-will are gladly bartered for a mess of pottage at the price of a slavish submission to the rules and regulations which govern their most trivial actions. To one who enters this land of the modern Lotoseaters everything becomes degradingly easy. A sleepy submission to the Board of Guardians and its officers is all that is required, and in return the food comes in due season, and that sense of having every thing done for one which saps the freeborn, forecasting spirit of the man. The adult pauper, once he has got to this stage, is generally given up as hopeless; he resembles an insect which by some miracle has made its transmutations backward, and commencing in the free, winged condition, has developed downwards to the grub, whose large appetite and sluggish movements no longer predict a fortunate future of activity.

But while philanthropists have pretty generally given up the confirmed adult, great and praiseworthy has been the struggle over the pauper children. Early in the attempt to introduce some element of finality in this descent into the modern Inferno, was the plan of separating the children from the adults. The richer Metropolitan Unions, with laudable zeal, started branch institutions in the country, where their boys and girls could at least, it was thought, acquire healthy bodies and be isolated from the taint of the infected habits that would otherwise surround them. With the best intentions in the world these institutions have been. enlarged and improved,-every modern appliance that would at once save the ratepayers money and improve the sanitary

nature! Too late it became evident that though these arrangements were well enough adapted to enhance the physical comfort of the children, and (theoretically at least), after the first heavy outlay, to reduce the expenditure to a minimum, yet the great end of the institution, viz., to educate a pauper's child into a self-supporting boy or girl and eventually into a man or woman of reasoning powers and decisive character, had been entirely lost sight of. The children grew up, were taught and drilled by an army of masters, mistresses, pupil-teachers, and miscellaneous officials, and so long as they were within the four walls, all went well. Some keen eyes noticed that after the tasks were over, the children seemed unable to play, and either lounged about purposelessly ors at listlessly in the sun, and did not augur well from this as to their future working powers. When they were old enough and had cost the ratepayers $100 a head a year, for some five or six years each,* these children were placed out at service. Strange to say, girls who had always found that hot water could be obtained spontaneously (and no doubt, on strict principles of political economy in such an institution, ought to have been obtained) out of a tap, proved unequal to boiling a kettle, and soon found or made an opportunity to return to the participation of the proceeds of the model steam-bakery, rather than submit to the endless petty errands and shifty jobs of a maid-of all-work's place. With a roll-call in England of between seven and eight hundred thousand paupers, a disposition on the part of boys and girls to consider these model institutions as their homes, and to return to them at intervals of rapidly diminishing length,

The St. George's, Hanover Square, Schools at Ashford cost £120 or $600 a bed, independent of keep.

was a symptom not to be neglected. It was obvious that the great district schools were only magnificent failures,and, singularly enough, juvenile emigration and the boarding-out system were commenced simultaneously by Miss Rye in Canada and Miss Florence Hill in England, though both systems were doomed to experience the determined opposition of the large army of officials whose only hold upon the ratepayer's pockets was through the schools and institutions which they had managed with such a persevering perverseness. The late Mrs. Nassau-Senior, fought a good fight against these evils, and her appointment by Mr. Stansfeld in 1873, as Inspector of the Female Workhouse Schools, was at once a great step towards the recognition of the peculiar fitness of a woman for such a post, and the means of a terrible exposure of a mistaken system. Her report on the subject disclosed the unpleasant fact that the longer the girls were kept at these training schools, the less favourable were the results that were obtained after they were placed out, and that the smaller schools were more successful than the larger district institutions, but that the rate, even in those schools where most personal supervision was given, was far from encouraging. In the first place, 74 girls out of 319 sent into service by the Metropolitan District schools, and 106 out of 351 sent out by the separate schools, could not be traced at all,—had vanished, too probably by means of rapid subsidence into their original pauper or vagrant element. This percentage (23 per cent. in one case, and 30 per cent. in the other) is sufficiently large, and we will compare it presently with the percentage among Miss Rye's girls on this side of the Atlantic. Out of the 245 girls in each class who had been traced, 62.28 per cent. from the District schools were reported as unsatisfactory or bad, and only 11.42 per cent. good (the balance being fair '); while 46.11 of the separate school's girls were bad or unsatisfactory, and 20.81 per cent. good.

We cannot here go into the merits or demerits of the boarding-out system in England; it certainly appears open to the objection that the weekly cash payment made with each child to the poor man or woman receiving it, is likely to be considered as a regular source of income, and applied rather in the support of the whole family than towards the boarded-out child alone.