the concentration of machinery at one spot. Mr. Babbage predicted fifty years ago that if a new power were to be discovered that could be generated in a central place in quantities sufficient for the requirements of a whole community, and then distributed, as gas is, wherever it was wanted, the age of domestic manufactures would return. Every little community might then find it cheaper, by saving carriage, and availing itself of cheaper local labour, to manufacture for itself many of the articles now made for it at the large mills; and the small factory or workshop, so suitable, among other advantages, for co-operative enterprise, would multiply everywhere. Now, have we such a power in electricity? If so, not the least important effect of the new agent will be its influence on the diffusion of wealth, and its aid towards the solution of the social problem of the nineteenth century. With land and agriculture the situation is somewhat different. The distribution of landed property has always depended largely on legal conditions; and since these conditions have--in this country at least--wrought for two centuries in favour of the aggregation of estates, their relaxation may reasonably be expected to operate to some extent in the contrary direction. Too much must not be built on this expectation, however, for the natural conditions are at present, at least, as partial to the large property as the legal. The abolition of entail and primogeniture, by emancipating the living proprietor from the preposterous tyranny of the dead, and by bringing to the burdened the privilege of sale, must necessarily throw greater quantities of land into the market than reach it now, but the redistribution of that land will as necessarily conform to the existing social and economic circumstances of the country; and England will never cease to be characterized by the large property, so long as its social system lends exceptional consideration to the possession of land, and its commercial system is continually creating an exceptional number of large fortunes. The market for the large estate is among the wealthy, who buy land as an instrument of enjoyment, of power, of social ambition; and what with the wealth made at home and the wealth made in the colonies, the number of this class is ever on the increase; the natural market for the small estate, on the other hand, is among the farming class, to whom land is a commercial investment, and the farmers of England, unlike those of other countries, unlike those of our own country in former days, are as a rule positively indisposed to purchase land, finding it more profitable to rent it. This aversion, however, is much more influential with large farmers than with small ones. It is commonly argued as if a small farmer who has saved money will be certain to employ it in taking a more extensive holding, but that is not so. On the contrary, he more usually leaves it in the bank; in some parts of Scotland many small farmers have