vance averts a degradation which would certainly ensue from its desecration; that observance involving some practical recognition of an Invisible Authority, and of a higher end in life than the pursuit of profit or pleasure.

XX.-DEMAND AND SUPPLY-THE HIGHER LAW.

THERE can be no question but that Supply-and-Demand is, as Thomas Carlyle phrases it, the great Commercial Gospel of this age; and," How shall I make the largest share of the common good mine, in the shortest possible time, and with the least possible exertion?" the paramount life-problem with the majority of active men. Both have got an impetus in these days altogether unprecedented. And faith in the principle just noted, stimulates activity in the hot pursuit of gain, and draws that activity into the channel of trade, rather than of productive industry. The law of Supply-and-Demand acts directly on Trade, and only indirectly on production, as we are now beginning practically to discover. During the Anti-Corn Law agitation, the accepted and unquestioned belief was, that you had only to clear obstructions from the channels of trade, and create a demand, in order to induce the requisite supply. Indeed, the great fear of the farmer and his "friends" was, that the supply would be only too abundant. Those fears have not been justified. Since the abolition of the corn and provision laws, the average price of our great staples of food has ranged as high as before, and butcher meat has been higher of late years than when the British farmer had a monopoly of the market. The case is the same with respect to those minor, but important articles of food-fish, butter, cheese, eggs, vegetables, and the greater proportion of fruits. Everything people eat is dear, everywhere, though we have the world for our market. In other countries you find it the same. Wherever there is steam communication there is an equalisation of prices, and the cost of the means of subsistence is high. This fact has not been unobserved. It forces itself on the attention of every one who travels, of every one who has a family to maintain, indeed, of every one who has to eat and live. Its social significance has, however, been only very dimly, if at all, apprehended. It points to an important correction, or rather limitation of the doctrine of Supply-and-Demand, and which this failure in our Cotton Supply is well adapted to signalise and illustrate.

With the facilities of communication and commercial intercourse now enjoyed with all parts of the world, Demand may generally be trusted soon to bring any article to the place where it is wanted, provided an adequate Supply can be obtained; but it does not by any means so readily ensure that supply. There are certain natural obstacles to all sudden increase of natural products-whether they belong to the animal, vegetable, or even mineral kingdoms-which are not to be immediately overcome. Animals take time to grow, to increase in numbers, and to have improvements effected in their breeds. Ere you can have a great increase of any kind of crop, fruit, or vegetable, you must have labour and manure skilfully applied to the soil; and of one, or other, or both, there may be but a limited available supply.

Every increase of natural product, or raw material, implies an increased application of labour, and that is generally found to be an irreducible obstacle to rapid increase. For example, there are at the present moment many suitable fields for the growth of Cotton--the Cotton Supply Association has recently, if we mistake not, enumerated some five-and-thirty localities where the plant can be advantageously grown-but in very many, where the soil and climate are most suitable, increased production is limited from an inadequate supply of labour. Enterprise and Capital are also needed, but they can be much more readily transferred to new fields than can available labour. These are what we may call natural limitations of the principe of Supply and Demand, in relation to natural products, and they cause Supply to be much less promptly obedient to Demand, where such are in requisition, than when it bears on trade or on manufacture. The market is directly and sensitively amenable to Dernand. Manufacture is not so directly in contact with it, but here a rapid increase of production can more readily be secured through the incomparably more extensive application of machinery to manufacture, than to the growth and production of raw material.

But there is a deeper element in the case, and one which our recent progress in locomotion, and other great facilities to an exchange of commodities, have tended very much to develcp. We refer to what, for want of a more definite name we must call the moral element. If it is not an original impulse of the human mind it is one which very early manifested itself--that of the desire to gain by trading. If the risks are greater, the returns of trade are quicker and larger than those of productive labour. And then, as the Irishman phrased it "there is the dignity of the thing." The merchant has been in modern days (until very lately, at least,) of more social consideration than the farmer, and the shop-keeper than the labourer. One does not require to dirty his fingers so much in trade as in labour, and it seems an easier life—also more genteel, or less ungenteel (one or the other according to your point of view). Hence the number of

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traders, merchants, shop-keepers, everywhere. Go wherever you may; into whatever town, at home or abroad, nothing strikes one more than the number of shops;-where can they all find custom? There is everywhere redundance of mere distributors, and the material influences and moral tone of society in these days continue to induce an increase of the class.

The social implications of the haste to be rich, so characteristic of our time, are very wide and deep. Within its scope of action, or within range of its influence, come many things which would, to a surface observer, betray no feature of relationship. In the first place, there is greater scope for the function of the merchant than there ever was before in the history of society, the world is all before him. In the second place, he can do business, convey his goods, and have a return of his capital, with whatever profit the transaction may bring-with incomparably greater rapidity. Steam and the telegraph have immensely facilitated-and proportionately stimulated trade. In the third place, the material of commerce has been immensely increased. The quantities of the old staple are vastly augmented, and an amount of new material has been introduced. As examples, we may instance the vast and ever growing business in stocks and shares.

Yet the field is too narrow for those who crowd into it, as the intensity of modern competition bears sufficient witness. This intense competition is felt to be a great social evil-the parent and promoter of many of our most outstanding and obstinate social evils-a fruitful source of social weakness and moral obliquity. It is already a great evil and we cannot shut our eyes to the peril of its becoming a still greater. The facilities and stimulants are so great. So many things conspire to make men impatient of the old mode of life—by honest, humble, persistent industry. We are now wafted on by the steamboat, and whirled along by the train, and the hurry of our locomotion is but the symbol of our moral life. There is bustle, haste, eager rushing forward, everywhere; we chafe and fret if we have five minutes to wait. But the processes of Nature do not yield to steam compulsion. Spring is as far apart from Autumn--sowing from reaping-as in the days of sailing ships and stage coaches. The function of the producer must continue to be one not only of much toil, but of sober expectation and of much enduring patience. It does not suit the temper or the tendencies of these times, and no one continues at it who can possibly get away. The reluctance of merchants and manufacturers not merely to become producers, but to apply their capital to production, has been strikingly illustrated in the present cotton famine. Cotton manufacturers have refused to risk anything in producing a substitute for the American supply. On the contrary the charge has been loudly preferred against them (and in the case of some we fear, not with

out truth) of selling their stocks of cotton wool for a high profit, and leaving their work-people to become paupers or starve. And it is in perfect harmony with the accepted doctrine of Demand-and-Supply that they should act thus.

It is in perfect harmony with that doctrine that they should so act. But this terrible cotton crisis-still deepening, still extending its baleful range is well adapted to compel attention to the inadequacy of that principle, not only to secure social well-being, but even industrial and commercial prosperity. Free trade is an inestimable boon to the world, but it is not the primary condition of national prosperity. Trade cannot long prosper unless production prosper proportionately. Its prosperity depends ultimately, and not remotely, on the abundance of raw material-depends, therefore, on the proportionate numbers of those who apply themselves to the production of that raw material. This is a truth so obvious that it might seem scarcely needful to be stated-certainly, would not need to be, were it not practically disregarded. That it is so, is a fact becoming growingly manifest.

The reason of the fact is seen in the great vice of the time-seeking to acquire wealth without earning it. Wealth may be really, honestly, earned in the professions, in manufacture, in many branches of trade; but, of all occupations, there is in that of the farmer (and of those engaged in producing the staples of human subsistence, and raw material generally,) the least temptation to acquire it dishonestly. Many trades subsist on the vices of the community; many on the ill-regulated desires and wasteful habits of the multitude; many on the ignorance and gullibility of the people. In trade there is much gain that can nowhere accrue but from another's loss; and, beyond a certain point, the more intensified competition becomes the greater is this proportion. But in the production of the raw material you cannot have a return without labour, diligence, and care. You cannot be dishonest; you are in direct contact with Nature, and you cannot by sharp practice, make her bleed at will. This is no doubt one reason why so many dislike productive industry, and make their escape from it whenever they can,‚—one reason amongst others why the proportionate number of those occupied in agriculture is year by year decreasing. That the case should be so, does not indicate a sound industrial and economical state. It will not do to say that it results from economy of labour, through the increased application of machinery to farming, for manufactures and trade have been facilitated in this way, much more than in proportion. It is due in part to the disadvantages and discouragements attaching to the condition of the agricultural labourer. But it is due also, and in still greater measure, we apprehend, to the deeper cause under notice. Our farming has advanced of late years, but not as it ought to have done. We have looked more to

trade than to production for a sufficient supply of the staples of subsistence, and have, year by year, been requiring to import these in larger quantities.

It is not a healthy tendency, as we have now begun bitterly to feel. Trade and manufactures are exposed to revulsions and reverses which agriculture never can suffer. That nation is most secure of prosperity which has its main sources of subsistence, not dependent on others, but within itself. This intensified propensity to trade could not go on and extend without affecting society deeply in many relations. The circumstances of the last few years have been adapted to develop this propensity beyond any other set of conditions known to the history of the world. Facilities of transit, the removal or relaxation of commercial restriction, and an immensely increased supply of the precious metals, have operated with combined force towards this. The whole world has been opened up to commercial enterprise and cupidity, and not only legitimate business, but illegitimate business, and gambling speculation, have got a tremendous impulse. This trade furor gave a prodigious impetus to manufacture as supplying the material of trade—an unhealthy and abnormal impetus, as is most signally shown in the fact that, while for many months our cotton mills have not been turning out one-half or one-third their previous amount of goods, and cotton wool has been rising for the last year and-a-half, till it has become quintupled in price, these goods have only quite recently begun to rise.

This tremendous blow, which has fallen on our greatest branch of manufacture, and all but extinguished it, may thus have in it an element of beneficence. As the potato blight gave the death blow to commercial restriction, and produced in Ireland a prædial and social revolution (arresting the descent of a nation into limitless and hopeless degradation), so may the cotton famine be the instrument, in the hands of Providence, of an industrial and social revulsion, not less exigent or important. Commerce and manufacture were bursting into abnormal and altogether disproportionate development, whilst everywhere a lack of adequate labour for the production of raw material and the staples of food was felt and complained of. Of cotton, the Supply had been kept up to the Demand by the maintenance of a system of enforced labourthrough the determinate maintenance of slavery in the Southern States. In the light of the above considerations, we may see, amongst other things, how slavery has been hitherto sustained and buttressed. The gain the system brought the slave-holders, and those who traded with them and furnished them with capital, was the immediate stimulus. But this owed its power, and we may say its existence, to the distaste for honest labour, which we have found so prominent a characteristic of the time. We may exclaim against slavery-and we ought to con