deposits of from £500 to £1000 lying there at interest; they studiously conceal the fact, lest their landlords should hear of it, and raise their rent, and they submit to much inconvenience rather than withdraw any portion of it, once it is deposited. Their ruling object is security and not aggrandisement, and consequently if land were in the market in lots to suit them, they would be almost certain to become purchasers of land. In forecasting the possibility of the rise of a peasant proprietary in this country, it is often forgotten that, whether land is a profitable investment for the farmer or not, the class of farmers from whom such a proprietary would be generated is less anxious for a profitable investment than for a safe one, and that to many of them, as of other classes, independence will always possess much more than a commercial value. But, however this may be, land is distributed by holdings as well as by estates, and in connection with our present subject the distribution by holdings is perhaps the more important thing of the two. "The magic of property" is no exclusive prerogative of the soil; ownership in stock will carry the same political effects as ownership in anything else; and a satisfactory system of tenant right may yield all the social and economic advantages of a peasant proprietary. In fact, tenant right, so far as it goes, is proprietorship, and it has before now developed into proprietorship even in name. The old lamented yeomanry of England were, the great majority of them, copyholders, and a copyholder was simply a tenant-at-will whose tenant right was consolidated by custom into a perpetual and hereditary property; and if the soil of England will ever again become distributed among as numerous a body of owners as held it in former ages, it will most likely occur through a similar process of consolidation of tenant right. But as it is--and though this is a truism, it is often overlooked in discussions on the subject--the tenants are owners as well as the landlords; their interests enlist them on the side of stability; they have a stake in the defence of property; and even though the prevailing tendency to the accumulation of estates continues unchecked, its peril to the State may be mitigated by the preservation and multiplication of small and comfortable holdings, which shall nourish a substantial and independent peasantry, and supply a hope and ambition to the rural labourers. This is so far well. We know that it is an axiom with Continental socialists that a revolution has no chance of success, however well supported it may be by the artisans of the towns, if the peasantry are contented and take no part in it; and the most serious feature in more than one of the great countries of Europe at this moment is the miserable condition into which their agricultural labourers have been suffered to fall, and their practical exclusion from all opportunities of raising themselves out of it. The