however he may value this in times of excitement it will in three elections out of four be of little real interest or moment to him.” Happily the working men knew better than the _Edinburgh_ reviewer, and the societies flourished all the more. The Conservatives were, of course, utterly indignant at this wholesale manufacture of faggot votes, as they were contemptuously termed, which threatened the seats of so many respectable Conservative county members, but in the end they thought better of it, and actually started a Conservative Freehold Land Society themselves, a fact announced to me in a letter from Mr. Cobden, which I have or ought to have somewhere in my possession. The societies increased so greatly that a journal was started by Mr. Cassell, called _The Freeholder_, of which I was editor, and was the means of often bringing me into contact with Mr. Cobden, a man with whom no one ever came in contact without feeling for him the most ardent admiration. At one time I saw a good deal of him, as it was my habit, at his request, to call on him each morning at his house in Westbourne Park, to talk over with him matters connected with the Freehold Land Movement, in which he took, as in everything that increased human progress, the deepest interest. As he once remarked half the money spent in gin would give the people the entire county representation, and besides provide them with desirable investments against a rainy day. Mr. James Taylor was always cheered as he showed his hearers how a man who drank a quart of ale a day engulfed at the same time a yard of solid earth. Land at that time was to be had remarkably cheap, and great profits were made by the early investors, and the moral benefit was great. Men learned the value of economy and thrift, and were all the better for gaining habits of forethought and self-denial. In our days the societies have become chiefly building societies, the political need of getting a vote in that way not being of so much importance as it was then.