barbarians. Only the beginnings of the commercial epoch, or age of bronze, are to be found in colonies. In production we witness the same supersession of individual enterprise by the limited liability company. This is also the case in distribution, where many obsolete Old World stages are recapitulated. We may still see the long, slow bullock team, the wearied pack horse (the fur trade in Canada was carried on by "brigades of pack horses"), the hawker, purveyor of news and gossip. We easily trace the evolution of the shop: at first a ship, then landed, with everything inside--groceries, meat, bread, fruit, and vegetables, clothes, crockery, ironmongery, stationery, and tobacco; the butcher first hives off, then the baker, the grocer; in course of time reintegration takes place, and shops are to be found in the colonial cities which reduplicate Whiteley's in London, where everything may again be had as in the beginning. The processes of exchange likewise recapitulate the past. Barter is long universal, and is still common in colonial villages. Even then a standard is needed. In the Old English period the "currency" consisted of cattle, named by a facetious writer "the current _kine_ of the realm." In Virginia and Maryland tobacco was the circulating medium for a century and a half, supplemented in Maryland with hemp and flax; taxes were paid in tobacco, and rent in kind. In Illinois and Canada, skins and furs, with wampum for small coin; in New England the latter singular currency was used far into the eighteenth century. New South Wales has the demerit of inventing the destructive medium of rum; wages were paid in it or in wheat; meal or spirits were taken at the doors of theaters. Store receipts for produce were given by the Government and passed current, not without depreciation; military officers issued bills for all sums up to one hundred pounds; private individuals, in the lack of specie, gave promissory notes. Fixed prices were long unknown; extortioners in the early days of all the colonies made a profit of a thousand per cent; and in quite recent days usurious attorneys exacted interest at the rate of a hundred per cent. Colonies sometimes anticipate the development of the mother country. The communistic dreams of the forties in France and England were for a brief while realized in old Virginia, as they are at this hour being realized in the village settlements of South Australia; and the state socialism rendered popular by the German victories of 1870 was perhaps more thoroughly embodied in convict New South Wales than anywhere else outside of Peru under the Incas, as it is now sweeping all of the Australasian colonies onward to an unknown goal. FOOTNOTES: [1] In its primary American sense the word _squatter_ denotes the backwoodsman described in the foregoing paragraph. In its secondary Australian sense it means the large landholder now described.