Would to heaven we could persuade men to throw aside, not for a time, but for ever, their party notions, and, what is still more difficult, their selfish interests; and induce them to look this great question broadly and fairly in the face! They will not find it treated of in their politico-economical treatises--those wretched collections of sophisms compiled by the dullest and most blear-eyed of mankind, which have been accepted in our day as monuments of transcendent wisdom. They will not find the question mooted at all in the tomes of their conceited statists: but if they step beyond that dreary range, and go forth into the scenes of busy life, they will hear it discussed, always eagerly, sometimes ably, sometimes incompetently, in the workshop, the forge, the factory, the cottage, and the mine; and they may then form some idea of the importance which the working-classes attach to that much-abused term--"the Rights of Labour." The mere general discussion of such a point implies that there is something amiss, either in our social or in our commercial and national system. With regard to the first, we think there can be no argument. Unless some totally new evangel has been reserved for these latter days, Socialism, as it is understood on the Continent, and even partially among ourselves, is a wild and miserable delusion. It has been tried, over and over again, under circumstances far more favourable for its development than any which are likely to occur again, and has invariably failed. Nay, the tendency of Liberalism has been to sweep what modified Socialism might exist in a civilised community away. Guilds, corporations, the chartered privileges of burghs, have all vanished, or been reduced to shadows, and nothing is now permitted to stand between the employer and the employed. Socialism, through the law, can have no existence. It may, indeed, lawfully rear and extend itself, if it can, on its own simple merits; but, tried by that test, it simply resolves itself into a new form of labour, liable to competition as before, and powerless to affect prices, by which labour must ever be estimated.