that this happy ideal is most nearly realised. Hence it is that these races are more and more coming to the front and surviving in the struggle for existence. The contrast of English and French colonisation affords a striking instance of this difference of races. A century and a half ago France stood as well as England in the race for colonial supremacy. She had the start of us in Canada, and her pioneers had explored the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and a large part of the continent of North America west of the Rocky Mountains. To-day there are sixty millions of an English-speaking population in that continent, while French is scarcely spoken beyond the single province of Quebec. Political events had doubtless something to do with this result; but it has been mainly owing to the innate qualities of the two races, for even the genius of Chatham might have failed to establish our supremacy if it had not been backed by the superior intelligence, energy, and staying power of the English colonists. The ultimate cause of the triumph of the English over the French element in America and India is doubtless to be found in the stronger individualism of the former. The character of the French is eminently social, they like to live in societies, and shrink from encountering the hardships and still more the isolation of the life of early settlers. They like to be administered, and shrink from the responsibility of hewing out, each for themselves, their own path in the relations of civil life or in the depths of primæval forests. It is so to the present day, and they fail conspicuously in creating a large French population even at their own doors in Algeria; while in their more distant colonies they conquer and annex, but to see their commerce fall into the hands of English, Germans, and Chinese, as in Cochin China, or to stagnate as in New Caledonia. As a witty French writer puts it, the trade of a remote French colony may be summed up as—imports, absinthe and cigars; exports, stamped paper and red-tape. Individualism in this case has been fairly pitted against Socialism, and has beaten it out of the field by the verdict of Fact, which is more conclusive than any amount of abstract argument.