employer, and enabled him to make the best terms for himself in every respect. There is no employer who does not feel that this is so, or whom Mr. Brassey's statistics, or any statistics, would convince that it is not. Fundamentally, value determines the price the community will give for any article, or any kind of work, just so much as it is worth. But there is no economical deity who, in each individual case, exactly adjusts the price to the value; we may make a good or a bad bargain, as many of us know to our cost. One source of bad bargains is ignorance. Before unions, which have diffused the intelligence of the labour market, and by so doing have equalized prices, the workman hardly knew the rate of wages in the next town. If this was true of the mechanic, it was still more true of the farm labourer. Practically speaking, the farm labourers in each parish of England, ignorant of everything beyond the parish, isolated and, therefore, dependent, had to take what the employers chose to give them. And what the employers chose to give them over large districts was ten shillings a week for themselves and their families, out of which they paid, perhaps, eighteen-pence for rent. A squire the other day, at a meeting of labourers, pointed with pride, and no doubt, with honest pride, to a labourer who had brought up a family of twelve children on twelve shillings a week I will venture to say the squire spent as much on any horse in his stables. Meat never touched the peasant's lips, though game, preserved for his landlord's pleasure, was running round his cottage. His children could not be educated, because they were wanted, almost from their infancy, to help in keeping the family from starving, as stonepickers, or perambulating scarecrows. His abode was a hovel, in which comfort, decency, morality could not dwell; and it was mainly owing to this cause that, as I have heard an experienced clergyman say, even the people in the low quarters of cities were less immoral than the rural poor. How the English peasants lived on such wages as they had, was a question which puzzled the best informed. How they died was clear enough; as penal paupers in a union workhouse. Yet Hodge's back, like that of Jacques Bonhomme, in France, bore everything, bore the great war against Republican France; for the squires and rectors, who made that war for class purposes, got their taxes back in increased rents and tithes. How did the peasantry exist, what was their condition in those days when wheat was at a hundred, or even a hundred and thirty shillings? They were reduced to a second serfage. They became in the mass parish paupers, and were divided, like slaves, among the employers of each parish. Men may be made serfs, and even slaves by other means than open force, in a country where, legally, all are free, where the impossibility of slavery is the boast of the law. Of late benevolence has been, abroad in the English parish,