though I am unable to say what it averaged; while the average cost of the 710 contested elections of guardians in England and Wales (in 1875) was under 191. each-no small consideration in these days of increasing rates, of distressed agriculture, and depressed, though we hope at last slowly reviving, trade: I may add that in 1879 there were one or more contests in 627 unions, or parishes on the footing of unions. In the parishes or wards where there were contests, there were a little over 1,500,000 ratepayers on the list, of whom very nearly 700,000 voted; but the total expense for all was under 20,500l.

I know that much of what I have here suggested will, if they ever hear of it, be unfavourably regarded by those election agents whose income largely depends upon their reputation for bringing up voters to the poll in numbers, which, under the present law, nothing but the hardest work guided by the greatest skill and experience enables them to do. Nor do I expect it to be better received, if they deign to notice it, by managers of caucuses, who would equally find themselves to a certain degree superseded by voting arrangements which would render much of their well-planned organisation and welldirected labour superfluous. But I am satisfied that there is nothing in what I have here written at all contrary to those Liberal principles which I have consistently supported for more than forty years, and am still as warmly attached to as ever.

I have not the presumption to suppose that I have in this paper suggested a thoroughly satisfactory Reform Bill, or a complete remedy for the great and growing evils of electoral corruption. I only venture to hope that I may be considered to have made out some case for full and public inquiry into the vitally important question of the future representation of the people-that is, for endeavouring carefully to ascertain the best practicable constituencies, franchises, and mode of voting for adoption before again legislating upon them—and that I have adduced some valid evidence and arguments in favour of such previous inquiry, and against hastening wildly to take another leap in the dark.'

January, 1881.

FORTESCUE.

POSTSCRIPT.

Since writing the above I have seen the Bill of the Attorney-General. No fair man can doubt that it proceeds from a sincere desire on the part of the Government to prevent for the future practices which have not only disgraced our Constitution in the eyes of the civilised world, but tend also seriously to demoralise more and more of our population, of which the borough electors form a considerable and increasing proportion. That its stringent provisions will deter many from giving and receiving bribes and liquor, I earnestly hope and believe. But I am not sanguine of the Bill's complete success, even in this respect, much less that its operation as a whole would

probably be, if at all, nearly as beneficial as its authors anticipate.. As I think I have shown already, the great difficulty even now is to induce voters to take the trouble of going to the poll. And that will not only continue, but increase, since much of the machinery now available for persuading the reluctant to vote is to be abolished and forbidden under penalties. The most respectable election agents being quite aware of this, and hopeless of producing in large constituencies, without thoroughly organised and systematic canvassing, the results expected by their employers, will more and more, I believe, decline the ungrateful office, and make way for others of a lower grade and with a lower standard. This of itself would be undesirable. But further, when the object to be attained is so very much sought after, we can hardly doubt that agents will soon be found ready, for an adequate consideration, to do the work of corruption, taking the risk of detection, exposure, and punishment. We have heard that in China a man may be got by liberal payment to undergo vicariously any punishment, even death. Imprisonment will have little terror, and exposure none, for a certain class of instruments. I have been credibly informed that one of the most active and effective agents at the election for a very large borough in 1874, at which, it is said, much more money was spent than had been supposed, was a person who was afterwards publicly announced as Liberal candidate for it. We shareholders learnt to our cost by his transactions as chairman of a large company, for which he was convicted and imprisoned, that the dread of the law was inadequate to deter him from illicit gains. But even if, contrary to my expectation, agents of a low class are found to be pretty effectually repelled, my fear is that these severe penalties will encourage the creation of secret organisations to do the work-one of the most dangerous tendencies of the present day.

but

Taking, however, the most hopeful view, and assuming that neither shameless agents nor secret organisations will be extensively employed to induce the electors to poll, we shall find another danger. The Attorney-General's Bill leaves upon the discharge of the important civil duty of voting a tax of trouble, which long experience shows to be prohibitory upon average electors in an average state, not of necessarily positive indifference as to the member to be returned, but of reluctance to spend the time and trouble required for polling. This practical ris inertiæ is only to be counteracted by some corresponding motive power, either personal or political. If political, this practical apathy can only be overcome by adequate political excitement. Personal canvassing allowed the adjustment of this to the requirements of each voter. The substitution of oratory for canvassing will lead to its being often employed with a fervour perhaps not more than just sufficient to rouse some of the electors from a state of what may be described as political coma, likely to produce in others a superfluous, nay mischievous, amount of what may be described as political frenzy. It is surely a great misfortune that voting in a calm and reasonable, if somewhat indolent, frame of mind should be so much discouraged. The danger is of members being returned by insignificant minorities of the constituency, either impassioned on behalf of some special religious or secular measure which they have honestly much at heart, or moved by some purely local feeling about some purely local matter, or else actuated by a keen sense of some deep personal interest or intense personal feeling. We should, I fear, find an utterly disproportionate influence exercised by extreme enthusiasts of all kinds—Ultramontanes, Ritualists, No-Popery men, Anti-State-Church men, Permissive-Bill men, denouncers of the Contagious Diseases Act, Anti-Vivisectionists-all honestly convinced that their own particular question has the first claim upon the attention of a Legislature charged with the interests of a whole Empire on which the sun never sets. Or we should find local, as distinguished from public, interests and feelings of predominant influence, and have donors of parks, founders of almshouses, and other conspicuous, but purely local, benefactors, of too often doubtful disinterestedness, returned, irrespective both of their politics and of their qualifications as legislators. Or else we shall find personal interests the motive power. And that these must be pretty intense to induce the average elector of a large constituency to go to the poll, we learn from the experience of the great commercial companies, which have only dozens, instead of thousands, of shareholders attending their meetings. Indeed, but

for the resource of postal circulars and the house-to-house collection of proxies, it is notorious that these concerns would every now and then be shattered by the unreasonable or sinister small minorities alone willing to attend.

Where a personal interest or public sentiment much stronger than that of a shareholder in a company is required to induce average electors to go to the poll, is it not formidably likely that such adequate private interest will be sinister; or that such adequate public sentiment will be the fruit, not of a quiet and reasonable political opinion, but either of intense yet narrow sectarian enthusiasm, or of violent yet petty local partisanship?

February, 1881.

F.

TRANSPLANTING TO THE COLONIES.

IN the competitive examination of remedies for Irish ill-content, each claiming the first place and confidently undertaking to answer the most trying questions, we cannot fail to discriminate between those that are well grounded in subjects of general applicability, and that are good for all, and the special topics, more difficult, but, if possible, more indispensable, for the cure of local and exceptional need. In a recent letter to the Times, Lord Meath points out succinctly, but suggestively, the duty of keeping the distinction in mind; and while dealing with the well-to-do portions of the country only as they may require, grappling boldly, by measures administrative rather than statutory, with the overcrowding of half-famished sea-coast counties of the west.

Over-population never was less true as a general description of Ireland, and never more true of particular districts than at the present hour. What aggravates the mischief and misery is the obvious and unchangeable fact that the paralysing and pitiable congestion exists where the soil and climate are comparatively unfavourable for small husbandry, or the maintenance in comfort of a peasantry dependent on its produce alone. The venerable earl, who has had ample experience as resident proprietor, popular representative, lieutenant of his county, and contributor to all useful works in the Irish metropolis, wisely endorses the recommendation already urged by the best and ablest men of every degree, that Government should initiate a liberal and comprehensive scheme for finding farms and homesteads in our colonies for those who are not, and cannot be, accommodated as they ought to be in Donegal, Mayo, Kerry, and Clare.

Whatever be the tenor of the forthcoming Land Bill, this I am sure is a sine quâ non of future prosperity and peace. From personal observation I know the condition of most of these districts well; and I am convinced, not as of yesterday, that a more mistaken policy cannot be conceived than that which would tether the willing but wageless conacre man to a miserable patch of half-reclaimed bog or mountain, the rent of which he can only earn by harvest-work elsewhere, and the produce of which, even in a dry summer, cannot yield more than the barest and lowest subsistence for his family. Legislative changes more or less beneficial in Wexford

or Antrim, Tipperary or Tyrone, can have no adequate effect on him. If you gave him his (miscalled) holding for nothing, it would not materially mend his plight to-morrow; and after to-morrow that plight would be as hopeless and insecure as now. Primary schools, model farms, creeping railways, cheap postage, teetotal lectures, newspapers without stint, tracts on cleanliness, and the multiplication of branch banks, all can avail nought to put firm ground under his feet. To use his own familiar phrase, his father was the like before him, and he never had a chance of doing better.' He knows that some of his kin are doing well in America; and in a wet season he wishes he was there too. With sunshine and new seed he laughs again; but if the 'crop should forget to come up,' he curses the rent which the overbidding of men like himself has made high, or the gombein he cannot pay. Again he wishes himself over the sea, where good land is plenty and wages are to be earned every day in the week. But the season is late, and he has not the means to go, and he lingers on moodily, wondering what may turn up, and ready to swell with his despair the voice of political discontent. The indisposition to labour often ascribed to him is refuted wherever abroad he gets the opportunity to work; but, where regular wages are not to be had from a want of middle classes of various degrees, the languor of disappointment and despondency grows habitual; and until the poor cottier tenant of the west is transplanted to happier soil, where his old griefs and habits may be alike forgotten, he can never be rescued from his destitution and discontent.

In a recent circular Mr. Vere Foster publishes a statement of applications for aid to single individuals to emigrate to Canada and the United States during the past year. Of these 335 were from Roman Catholic and 77 from Protestant clergymen, dispersed throughout the various dioceses from Raphoe to Cloyne. The cost of transit, about 91. per head, was generally made up by contributions of three-fourths advanced by friends and relatives on promise of repayment, when possible, and one-fourth contributed by charitably disposed persons from a fund long established for the purpose. The parish priest, when vouching for the respectability of the applicant, seldom failed to speak of the necessity with regret; but he did not on that account refrain from backing the urgency of the claim. And if this be so when the intending emigrants are young and single women, how much more cheerfully might he not be disposed to recommend assistance for youths of the other sex, or in cases where whole families might be transplanted together! The want of sufficient means is the only obstacle in the way, for every consideration, moral, social, and political, tells in the balance in favour of household or village emigration, in preference to desultory efforts to aid the most healthy and adventurous members of the family. Ample experience proves that those who are thus assisted to go forth and seek their fortune