Is it not a reasonable supposition? It always seems to me a strange thing that men should insist that you must first transport your labourer thousands of miles to a desolate, bleak country in order to set him to work to extract a livelihood from the soil when hundreds of thousands of acres lie only half tilled at home or not tilled at all. Is it reasonable to think that you can only begin to make a living out of land when it lies several thousand miles from the nearest market, and thousands of miles from the place where the labourer has to buy his tools and procure all the necessaries of life which are not grown on the spot? If a man can make squatting pay on the prairies or in Australia, where every quarter of grain which he produces has to be dragged by locomotives across the railways of the continent, and then carried by steamers across the wide ocean, can he not equally make the operation at least sufficiently profitable to keep himself alive if you plant him with the same soil within an hour by rail of the greatest markets in the world? The answer to this is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt, is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it, and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children after him, a freehold estate. Freehold estates, I admit, are not to be had for the picking up on English soil, but if a man will but work in England as they work in Canada or in Australia, he will find as little difficulty in making a livelihood here as there. I may be wrong, but when I travel abroad and see the desperate struggle on the part of peasant proprietors and the small holders in mountainous districts for an additional patch of soil, the idea of cultivating which would make our agricultural labourers turn up their noses in speechless contempt, I cannot but think that our English soil could carry a far greater number of souls to the acre than that which it bears at present. Suppose, for instance, that Essex were suddenly to find itself unmoored from its English anchorage and towed across the Channel to Normandy, or, not to imagine miracles, suppose that an Armada of Chinese were to make a descent on the Isle of Thanet, as did the sea-kings, Hengist and Horsa, does anyone imagine for a moment that Kent, fertile and cultivated as it is, would not be regarded as a very Garden of Eden out of the odd corners of which our yellow-skinned invaders would contrive to extract sufficient to keep themselves in sturdy health? I only suggest the possibility in order to bring out clearly the fact that the difficulty is not in the soil nor in the climate, but in the lack of application of sufficient labour to sufficient land in the truly scientific way.