distances than near Reading. I am informed of instances where they walk as far as six miles; that is, twelve miles daily, or seventy-two miles weekly, to and from their places of work. Let us consider the bare economy, the mere waste of labour, and what a state of agricultural management is indicated by the fact that such a waste can have taken place. Fifteen miles a day is the regular march of infantry soldiers, with two rest-days—one on Monday, and one on Thursday; twenty-four miles is a forced march. The man who expends eight miles per diem, or forty-eight miles per week, expends to the value of at least two days' hard labour per week, or one hundred in the year, uselessly, that might be expended usefully and remuneratively in production. How different is it in manufactories, and in some of the mines, or at least in the best-managed and most successful of them! In some mines as much as £2000 and £3000 is paid for new machinery to benefit the labourers, and save them the labour of ascending and descending by ladders. In many manufactories they have hoists to raise them and their loads from lower to upper rooms, to save them the labour of toiling up stairs, to economize their strength for piece-work to mutual advantage. It is not in county and borough towns only that this unwholesome over-crowding is going on. I am informed that from the like cause the evil of over-crowding is going on in the ill-conditioned villages of open parishes. It is admitted, and made manifest in extensive evidence given before a committee of the house of lords by practical farmers, that when an agricultural labourer applies for work, the first question put to him is, not what has been his experience, what can he do, but to what parish does he belong. If he do not belong to the parish of the occupier, the reply is usually an expression of regret that he can only employ the labourer of his own parish. To the extent to which the farmer is directly liable to the payment of rates, by the displacement of a settled parish labourer, he is liable to a penalty for the employment of any other labourer who is not of the parish. To the same extent is he liable to a penalty if he do not employ a parish labourer who is worthless, though a superior labourer may be got by going farther a-field, to whom he would give better wages. This labourer who would go farther is thus driven back upon his parish; that is to say, imposed, and at the same time made dependent, upon the two or three or several farmers, by whom the parish is occupied. He then says, 'If this or that farmer will not employ me, one of them must; if none of them will, the parish must keep me, and the parish pay is as good as any.' Labour well or ill, he will