All this, however, seems to us to point to the probability of free-trade becoming ere long the watchword of the working-classes in the United States. With free-trade in labour concurrently with land-speculation, subjecting them to diminution of wages, and at the same time increase in the cost of living, they will have no alternative but to demand the free admission of all materials bearing on their industries and affecting the cost of living. It is possible that in the present great land-movement may be germinating the seeds of the next great commercial crisis; and upon the theory of periodicity, one of these crises will be due in a year or two. So, also, it is probable that the Emigration movement from the east has carried and is carrying with it elements which will aid in bringing about the much to be desired future of free-trade. BY MEAD AND STREAM. CHAPTER LI.—HEY, PRESTO! Coutts having seen that his father and sisters were provided with all necessary comforts, hastened to the city. He had an appointment which could not be postponed; he could do nothing more at Ringsford; in town he could arrange with some contractor to send out a band of men to make the least injured portion of the Manor again habitable, and to clear away the débris as quickly as possible. The appointment was to meet Philip and Wrentham at Mr Shield’s apartments. Coutts was confident that the bill he held was a forgery. He had no doubt Philip had been fooled into it somehow, but that was no reason why _he_ should be fooled out of it. The way Shield had received him plainly indicated that he would give him no place in his will; whilst he was anxious to avoid scandal which would involve Philip. ‘Well, if the old fellow won’t give me a slice of his fortune, I’ll screw a plum out of it,’ was Coutts’s agreeable reflection. ‘I have the forged bill, and unless he hands me over double the amount, I don’t give it up.’ That was a ‘smart’ stroke of business, which delighted Coutts almost as much as the prospect of gaining such a large sum of money, and of making the ‘old fellow’ stump up in spite of himself. There was, too, in his mind a kind of moral fitness in the transaction; for it would be paying out this precious uncle for some of the annoyance he had caused his father. In addition, there was to be reckoned the satisfaction of outwitting one of the cutest scamps he had come across—a fellow who had overreached even him—for with the same move which was to checkmate Shield, Wrentham would be paid out too. He gave little consideration to his brother, having no doubt that he would escape all right somehow.