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asian Colonies, 4s. 6d. per annum.

The Yearly subscription may commence at any time. Money Orders or 1d. and d. stamps preferred. Remittances and business communications to be addressed to THE MANAGER, Beacon Office, 349

Collins-street, Melbourne.

MELBOURNE, MARCH 1ST, 1894.

of employment, or are threatened with an early dismissal, the condition and prospects of traders are by no means enviable. From the storekeeper, who cannot collect his debts, the embarrassment extends to the wholesale merchant, who, as a consequence, must renew the bills. The working expenses of the business go on, the stocks cannot be profitably disposed of, and the turnover is contracting in such a manner that the losses increase from month to month. Where will it end? is the general cry, a cry which must soon find its inevitable answer. Where can it end, when farmers are giving way to sheep; when those of them who remain, are too much im

The Beacon. giving way

largest production and the most equitable dis-poverished to pay their debts or make

"Where wages are highest, there will be the tribution of wealth. There will invention be most active, and the brain guide best the hand. There will be the greatest comfort, the widest diffusion of knowledge, the purest morals, and the truest patriotism."-HENRY GEORGE (Protection or Freetrade).

MARCH 1ST, 1894.

new purchases beyond the absolutely necessary; when thousands of workers are standing idly in the street, and when the flower of our population, the men in their prime, are flocking from the colony wholesale, leaving the remainder to maintain an ever-increasing proportion of non-producers ? Where can it end, but in general bankruptcy and such suffering and distress as no British colony has ever experienced.

Nero fiddling while Rome is burning, seems to be the only illustration capable of adequately expressing the attitude of the Patterson Ministry. The already serious condition of the farmers has been aggravated, and has, in many parts, been made desperate by the conjunction of a bad harvest with the lowest prices on record. All over the country foreclosures and forced sales are the order of the day, driving more and more industrious families into the ranks of the unemployed. Even at the present time, when the weather is favourable to outdoor work, the ranks of unemployed men are rapidly filling, and in town and country alike, the thought of the approaching winter sets thousands of hearts quak-It ing. Severe as the suffering has been during the last two, the coming winter threatens to excel them in the want and misery which will be inflicted on thousands upon thousands of households in the land.

Nor are the mercantile classes in a much better position. Not to speak of the clerks, shopmen, and warehouse assistants who have been thrown out

What is the Government doing all this time? Mr. Patterson, its head and backbone, apparently is of opinion that the latter will be most effectively exhibited in a game of bluff. According to him, there is no necessity to do anything; there are no unemployed, except a few agitators in the city; and at the banquets which he attended during his country tours, there was not a single man to be found who was not fully employed. does not matter that his colleague, Mr. Webb, who knows a little more about the country than can be learned from the box seat of a four-in-hand, or from that at the right hand of the chairman at a festive gathering, gives his testimony to the contrary. How can there be anything wrong with the country as long as this great man is Prime Minister? The thought is preposterous and cannot be entertained for a moment.

PRICE, 1D.

are

His colleagues, meanwhile, offering similarly preposterous spectacle to the country. The Treasurer proposes to cure the country's cancer with the bread poultice of five per cent. loans to a limited number of farmers, whose properties are unencumbered. Well might the "Argus" call it "greasing the fat pig while the lean one is allowed to starve." It is a work of supererogation to come to the help of the farmers who are unencumbered. However much such a course may win influential support for Ministers at the coming elections, it cannot retain a single farmer upon the land. For the time being, Mr. Carter seems to have shelved the opinion which he has so often expressed when in opposition, that our protective tariff is undermining the prosperity of the country. There is nothing the matter with the tariff now, a few thousand pounds of cheap money is all the reform necessary to set the country on its feet again.

Messrs. Richardson and M'Coll,

meanwhile, are engaged in still more sportive ventures. There is nothing more pressing upon their hands than a trip into the Gunbower constituency for the purpose of inspecting the course of proposed railway to Cohuna. We readily absolve both these gentlemen from any serious intention of building this railway any time during the next twenty years. A line which would merely compete with the traffic on already existing lines; which would not pay this side of the next quarter of a century, but which would enable a wealthy squatter to cut up some of his run into township allotments and increase the value of the rest, is not one which can be seriously advocated now. should think that these Ministers of the Crown had something serious to attend to than merely junketing about the country for the purpose of throwing dust into the eyes of the constituents of one of them.

But we

more

Thus the Ministry is fiddling away the time which ought to be employed

All Judges of Tobacco Smoke PHOENIX or “DON."

in devising measures for stemming the rising tide of distress, in underpinning the crumbling foundations of our industrial system, and in repairing the damage which their own ill-advised blows have done. The country knows its wants; but the Ministry is perfectly oblivious of any necessity to supply them. Here are three demands made by a meeting of delegates of six Wimmera shires, who assembled in Horsham on the 18th inst., demands which are echoed and re-echoed all over the country: Lower the Customs duties, which prevent us from reaping the full price which our customers in England are paying for our produce. Lower the freights on our railways, which absorb from a fourth to a third of our produce for carrying it; and withdraw the demand for arrears of rent for the present, for it deprives us of the last remnant of our already curtailed credit, and paralyses us at the very time when we want all our vital force to keep afloat.

Here is a perfectly feasible and moderate programme, the immediate execution of which would, at any rate, give breathing time to the country, and which, bringing about renewed activity there, would react favourably upon the market of labour and goods in the city. By itself, it must be confessed, it would not be a complete solution of the difficulties under which we labour. In order to remove the distress in the city, more drastic measures will be required. Whatever they are, the Ministry that has voluntarily grasped the helm of State in these troublous times, must either propose and carry them, or give way to more capable men. If they are not able to cope with the difficulties of their post, they have no imaginable right to occupy it. It is impossible to say whether they possess this ability, for so far they have not betrayed by a sign, that they are aware of the existence of any call for its exercise. Whether this blindness is assumed or whether it is real, it is equally serious. Under these circumstances we, who do not usually agree with the "Age," and who have little confidence in Parliament, cannot help joining in the demand for an immediate session. For if the Ministry is prepared to propose adequate measures of relief, their immediate adoption by Parliament is necessary; and if the Ministry is not so prepared, their immediate supercession by abler men is equally called for. In either case the necessities of

the country urgently demand action,
and no Ministry can be allowed to
stop the way.

Whither Next ?

other lands. England, inundated by the poorly-paid masses of Europe, also cries "No room," while Australia also sends word to the home-land that here is "No room." West Australia reports to Victoria," Do not send men here," while colony by colony, land by land, throughout the world re-echoes the cry. Remarkable also to notice is that numbers of able, intelligent men, with their wives and families, are leaving the spacious and fruitful lands of this continent to found a "New Australia" in South America.

But this fact must now be faced.

It is certain that the industrial changes of this century must be followed by alterations just as great in our social life. How man is conform ing to his new environments may be shown in the case of the introduction of improved methods of locomotion, where the whipping of the unemployed That the many do not leave the from tithing to tithing has been dis- land of their birth by choice is surely placed by the institution of Interna- to be taken for granted. When we see tional Emigration laws. The distinct old folks with their white hairs, tendency being for the local to broaden mothers with babes, fathers and sons into the national and the national with tearful face at the port of deparultimately into the universal, the ture as they turn from country home serious consideration before us is, that and friends; when we follow these if in any direction our advance be on lives and find the one yearning is to wrong lines, eventually there may be see the native land once more, we a breakdown, in which all civilisation realise it must be stern necessity that will participate. The very subject of compels them to become exiles. The international emigration for this majority emigrate, not because they reason demands earnest enquiry. are free to, but because they are Whither is its tendency towards forced. achievement or catastrophe ? In other words-Are the tendencies causing emigration, local or universal? If local it may afford relief, if universal there will soon be no other alternative than to either make a different one of this or seek another world. Awful to tell, in Melbourne, destitute unemployed with no other means of escap. ing from their troubles, by plunging into the Yarra are showing their earnestness in seeking another world. For many years the United States afforded an open field for the distressed of all nations. But that pressure is now being felt there from within is witnessed to by the agitation against Canadians crossing the border, and the stringent immigration laws being passed against the incoming of Europeans. The erstwhile stirring advice of Horace Greeley, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country," now begins to fall on deaf ears, for the East swarms with men who have been West but have returned defeated and disheartened. Not only is the crowd turning on itself, but men, leaving the Grand Republic, are returning to the old countries of Europe. Some Hungarian miners going back home told a New York interviewer how, in their own country, they would work less and live better. Yet though the cry is, "No room," nearly half a million immigrants enter the United States yearly, such is the pressure in

Running away is coming to an end. Not only is door after door being shut, but even on its merits it is becoming useless to emigrate anywhere. The next stage will be staying at home. Nations have hitherto been able to evade the questions which the Sphinx is putting to our civilisation, for the restless, the discontented, the wronged have been generally ready to solve the problem by considerately removing from the scene. But now the safety valves are being closed while the steam is at ever-increasing pressure. Is there to be relief, or shall there be a universal cataclysm in which our civilisation will disappear, as others before it have done, leaving behind a glorious yet ignoble history?

In conclusion, it is plain that the opening up of new lands and the increased facilities of travel have enabled multitudes to escape from the strain of living under unnatural conditions, brought about by pernicious legislation wholly in favour of privileged classes. But as these fugitives from wrong have consented to the implanting of these evil laws in the new lands, it is inevitable that the miseries of the older countries shall be faithfully reproduced in the new. A landed aristocracy, unjust discrimination voting powers, grossly unfair (nay, fraudulent) systems of taxation, are now thriving apace, and are supported

Smoke "DON" TOBACCO for Enjoyment.

in

by those who should never have tolerated such excresences. The effects are now being felt, but no longer is there the opportunity to run away. By staying at home and, as men and women, refusing any longer to either compound with or flee from wrong, this world may yet be made a paradise to those willing to work well upon it. But the basis of all reforms, the absence of which has brought about our present evil condition, is the removal of the parasite-breeding monopolies that are feeding upon and slowly destroying the body politic, and the restoration to the multitudes of the land values they have created.

The Despotism of
Socialism.

IV.

History shows that all delegated power tends to become independent of the delegators, and that this tendency increases in the ratio of the distance which separates the delegators from the delegated. The Papacy has its roots in the freelyelected presbyter of the early Church, and the Czar of Russia, in the village elder, whose experience and strength gave him the confidence of his fellow villagers. It cannot be otherwise, for the desire to extend their power is infinitely stronger in those to whom power has been entrusted, than the desire to resist such extension can be in any one of the many who have entrusted them with it.

Hence it is the first and foremost object of Democracy to restrict the delegated power of the State to its absolutely necessary minimum. The function of the State is to regulate, the same as that of the governor on a steam engine. To entrust it with powers exceeding this function is as unnecessary and foolish as to make a governor too weighty for the engine. In either case the excessive governing power causes friction, hindrance, and ultimately a breakdown.

Socialism, on the contrary, wishes to enlarge the power of the State to an extent which even the greatest effort of the imagination fails to fully realise. A Central Board is to regulate the entire industry of the country, that of the national as well as of the municipal workshops. It is to determine the quantity and quality of the product to be made in any factory throughout the country. The national workshops are to be under its imme

diate control, while the municipal
factories federated with it, and inter-
nally managed by municipal officers,
are yet dependent on the national
board for the quantity and quality of
the goods which they produce.

A hierarchy of officials, elective or
otherwise, will thus allot and superin
tend the work and fix the reward of
every citizen, male and female. In
order that this scheme may be carried
out, certain powers must be allotted to
them. In order that they may control
the quantity and the nature of the
goods to be produced, they must have
power (a) to fix the abode of every
man and woman; (b) to determine
the employment of every man and
For in order that the labour
of the nation may be most productive,
every trade must be carried on in the
localities most suitable to it.

woman.

On the other hand, the changing character of the national requirements makes it impossible to employ the same number of men and women year after year at the same trade. Consequently the officials must have the right to compel men and women who are not wanted for one kind of labour to undertake some other kind, and as the seat of the latter need not necessarily be in the same locality, they must possess the power to compel these men and women to go to another one.

The socialistic organisation of labour therefore requires that officials shall have the power to confine every man and woman to certain localities, or to assign to them other localities, and also to determine what shall be the nature of their employment. Unbearable as such powers must become, when used conscientiously, they are manifestly liable to the greatest abuse. For they place in the hands of officials the selection of the men and women who shall be assigned to new trades and localities. Any man or woman displeasing to them may be shifted, may be separated from those dear to them, may be assigned to a trade for which they are not fitted or which they dislike. Husband may be parted from wife, father and mother from growing daughters, the lover from his bride, to serve the secret purposes of some official. Soon there will develop a secret understanding among the latter, which enables them to communicate to each other the character and conduct of any man or woman, with the result that anyone who has become obnoxious to one official will be regarded as the enemy of the system and treated accordingly.

PHOENIX TOBACCO has no

Nor is this all. There must be power to force every worker to do the work allotted to him or her, and to do it properly. The incorrigible idler must either be punished or ultimately excluded from work. What has he to do then? He must starve. Serve him right, will be said. But what if he is not an idler, if he simply lacks the dexterity or strength necessary for the work which has been assigned to him. Is he then to starve also? As the officials must have power to assign every one to certain work, they will then have the power to expose every one they dislike to certain starvation.

If all workers receive the same wage, without regard to the result of their labour, these conditions will be intensified. For in that case the men and women who voluntarily would undertake the more difficult or disagreeable kinds of labour would be few, and the door would be opened wide for bribery and the punitive selection of malcontents for such labour.

If, on the other hand, each labourer is to be rewarded according to the result of his labour, the question arises, who is to settle what is the result of his labour? Officials of course, and every man and woman, would therefore again be dependent on the goodwill or honesty of the officials for the reward of their labour.

The entire country would thus be converted into a huge prison house, every inmate of which would have his particular cell assigned to him, as well as the work which he is to do and the wages which he is to receive for it. If his or her conduct is pleasing to the warders-if it is sufficiently subservient in all the things which these beings of a higher order may demand-then will fall to his or her lot the best cells, the easiest work, and the highest wages.

On the other hand, those men among them who showed any sense of independence, or those women who retained any self-respect, would quickly be made to feel their helpless condition by consignment to inferior cells, to harder and more disagreeable work, by the allotment of lower wages, and ultimately, by being excluded from society altogether and forced to starve.

Who among the workers would under such conditions dare to oppose the will of the bureaucracy? Who would dare to publicly oppose the reelection of an official who wielded powers like these? Who would even Rival for Flavour.

dare to vote against him with the danger before his eye, that the voting papers themselves are at the mercy of the bureaucracy? The men who possessed the daring to do these acts, would indeed be few and far between, and, whether elective or otherwise, the officials once appointed would be practically irremovable and irresponsible.

Once arrived at this stage, the further development would be certain, for officialdom would now be free to organise itself as it pleased. At first it would probably become customary to elect the son to succeed the father in his post, customary because all officials would be interested in seeing the system established, and would consequently use their powers to effect it. Later on even this form would be neglected, and every post would be

The annual subscribers to the Beacon now

says

Age number over 1900, and total sales amount to close upon 5000, and yet the " there is not a real Free Trader in Victoria. The wish is father to the thought, or rather lie.

About eighty million rupees is raised annually in India by a salt tax. Because of this tax salt is so scarce and dear that men and cattle alike go short. According to Mr. J. B. Pennington, in the "Asiatic Quarterly Review," cholera and cattle disease are the

endeavour to secure bread to all by
socialistic means, the freedom and in-
dependence of all would be sacrificed
to the Moloch of the State. The result
would be national destruction, or a
revolution which would lead to chaos.
Mankind would have to begin afresh,
would have again to travel the same
weary road over which it has passed,
until with the re-establishment of
order first, of individual freedom after-result.
wards, a wiser generation would re-
discover and put into practice the
measure of justice by which political
and economic freedom can be re-
conciled.

Current Accounts.

"You nigger; why, you grumble about freedom? Don't you get enough to eat?"

The directors of the South Eastern Railway, England, have decided to advance money to their employees at 4 per cent. interest to enable them to purchase their own houses on terms of repayment more favourable than can be obtained from the building societies.

Ha! my masters, there is music in the Yes, air. These are revolutionary times. yes; a serious mistake you made when you permitted the masses to get an education. Had you but strangled the public school

[graphic]

PROLONGING THE AGONY.
Pussy (smiling): Better an open enemy than a doubtful friend.
The earth is the common property of all
men.-Pope Gregory the Great.

come hereditary by right, absolute power would vest with the Central Board, provided such a board were still in existence. The probability, however, is that it had disappeared or become merely advisory, the real power vesting in a solitary individual, the hereditary autocrat, whose will would be law, whose power would be unlimited, and whose lust and pride would devastate the world. The Cæsars of Rome, or the Incas of Peru, would be reproduced in the socialistic state, with all the horrors, with all the crimes, and all the adulation which history records.

The inevitable, the necessary outcome of the establishment of the socialistic state, therefore, is despotism; a despotism more powerful and farreaching than any which the modern world has witnessed.. In the vain

Charity bails the boat. Single Tax would stop the leak.

The land values belong to the people. Keep this in mind, whatever be the political expedient of the moment.

The reserved right of the people to the rental value of land must be construed as a condition to every deed.-United States Sup. Court.

A labourer turns a desert into a garden, and then we increase his taxes. The speculator turns a garden into a desert, and then we diminish his taxes. Verily, we are a great people.

It was to the selfish panic of the landowners that England owed the statute of labourers and its terrible heritage of pauperism.-J. R. Green.

In the Vale of Belvoir, England, the Duke of Rutland owns land producing an annual rent of about £40,000 a year, or rather, men pay it for permission to work on the land.

system in its infancy, ye would now have peace and slaves.-"Pacific Coast Seaman's Journal."

"The Railway Reform Association" has been started in Great Britain, its primary object being the State purchase of the railways in Great Britain and Ireland; to abolish the present railroad monopoly; to make the iron roads as free and accessible to

the public as possible, and to effect an immediate reduction in the present exorbitant charges for the conveyance of goods. These reforms it hopes to inaugurate.

The "Argus" says that the man who denies that the tariff can be reformed without loss of revenue is a fool. Very true, oh, argus-eyed, but how far can the reform be carried without reducing the revenue? Apparently not far, for we see that the tariff reforms carried in America, and called "moderate" by the "Argus," necessitate the imposition of an income tax. What name shall we give then to the man who says that you can establish Free Trade without loss of revenue? What is the "Argus," anyhow? Has it abdicated its Free Trade pretensions

PHOENIX AROMATIC AND DARK TOBACCO.

and become a mere tariff reformer, i.e., a moderate Protectionist ? If so, most people will prefer the genuine article dished up in the "Age." Or does the "Argus" still advocate Free Trade of the English pattern? In that case, some information as to how the loss of revenue is to be made up would be welcome. Is it to be a property tax still, or has the wind veered round since last year? Anyhow, the farmers are anxious to know what system of taxation the "Argus" has in its mind when it professes to be able to raise revenue without burdening the land. Until the wonder is revealed, they will continue to suspect that the solution of the mystery is a tax which will burden their land severely while falling lightly on the valuable land of the squatter and city landlord. It is the landowning, not the landusing, interest for which the " Argus" appears to be solicitous.

The New Zealand correspondent of the "Argus" bears testimony in their issue of the 17th ult. to the popularity of the perpetual lease system. "Settlers do not care to pay cash for land when they can get a lease for 999 years from the Government at a rental of 4 per cent. on the capital value." The valuations are made periodically, and the improvements are not included in them, the tenants paying rent to the State on the Single Tax principle, according to the unimproved value of their land.

In an article in the "Calcutta Review," Mr. F. H. Barrow attributes the deplorable condition of the Bengalese entirely to "the utter relaxation of all control over their land affairs by the State." The Zemindars were formerly the agents of the Mohammedan rulers, appointed to collect for the State a fixed proportion of the produce of the land. The Indian Government converted them into absolute owners with the full rights of British landlords. Formerly the rent the people paid went in reduction of the expenses of government; now they pay all the expenses of government and the rent as well.

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Matabele customs are exceedingly bar barous, to judge from what we learn of them from the Rev. D. Carnegie's article "Among the Matabele," appearing in the "Sunday at Home" of last December. This is what he says: "Lazy persons who will not help in sowing or reaping are driven from town to town. No work, no food, is the motto for them. The queens themselves dig their gardens, and everybody who can must help to prepare for the dry season." Apparently there are no landlords who are allowed to live on other people's labour among the Matabele. But they are savages, you know!

What! you are in the midst of the uprising, not of a town, but of the whole human race; you see brute force on the one side, and right on the other; whole nations are struggling under oppression; men slaughter each other at your very doors; they die by hundreds, by thousands, fighting for or against an idea; this idea is either good or evil; and you continuing the while to call yourselves men and Christians, would claim the right of remaining neutral? You cannot do so without moral degradation. Neutrality, that is to say, indifference between good and evil, the just and the unjust, liberty and oppression, is simply Atheism.Mazzini.

The Land Nationalisation Society, one of whose demands is that the land values should defray the taxation of the nation, has risen to the occasion, and is showing the miners that the root of their whole trouble is the curse of land monoply.

Lectures have been delivered in over 70 towns and villages in the North of England and the South of Scotland. Many friends of the movement are to be found in the great miners' unions, and it is hoped a regu. lar winter series of meetings will be held in the miners' halls. There has also been a careful distribution of many thousands of leaflets and handbills, on which latter is printed the well-known cartoon of the landlord and the bags of rent.

Our social system may be constructed with all possible labour and ingenuity, and be strongly cramped together with cunningly devised enactments, but if there be no rectitude in its component parts, if it is not built on upright principles, it will assuredly tumble to pieces. As well might we seek to light a fire with ice, feed cattle on stones, hang our hats on cobwebs, or otherwise disregard the physical laws of the world, as go contrary to its equally imperative ethical laws.-Herbert Spencer.

A Land Tax will not reach the wealth of Daniel Cooper, Bart., who, according to an authority, draws £85,000 per annum from his Sydney properties. His leases are so worded that any such tax will fall on the lessees, and most of his property is leased out. An Absentee Tax alone will do the deed.-" Bulletin," Feb. 10th, 1894.

Pity the poor "Bulletin." It apparently cannot conceive the possibility of an Act of Parliament over-riding a private contract. Anybody else could easily see that power could be given to the tenant to deduct the tax from his rent, any covenant to the contrary notwithstanding, and would know that a similar provision is already contained in the English Statute, under which the Landlords' Property Tax is raised.

before Miss Bessie B. Croffut as an opponent The Duke of Argyll pales to insignificance of Henry George. Miss Croffut finds that in the back blocks of the States, "although every man is the possessor of 500 to 1000 acres of arable land wherever he may choose to select it; yet four out of five of these same men prefer to work by the month for little more than their board and clothes." Her article on this subject in the "North American Review" is entitled "A Tempting Theory in Practice." Miss Croffut has apparently never heard of the M'Kinley Tariff, and doesn't know that the American farmer is getting all "the blessings of Protection."

"The

Whilst we may possibly agree with Mr. E. N. Dingley, who affirms in the September number of the "American Journal of Politics" that there is no such thing as an unearned increment, we can hardly agree with his reasons for so thinking. colt becomes a horse, the seed becomes the garden"; and so it is, according to Mr. Dingley, with land. This worthy gentleman has evidently overlooked the fact that the colt requires feeding and caring for, or it would starve; it requires breaking in, or would be worthless. The seed has to be sown on ground carefully tilled and prepared, and requires much labour to be expended in its reaping, threshing, and carrying to

market. Not so land. Major Howie and his predecessors, the proprietors of Nichol. son's corner, Swanston street, expended no labour on their land. Its increase in value was due to increase in population and expenditure of public money on public works. It may, however, be wrong to call it an unearned increment, because although Major Howie never earned it, possibly the State or society did.

As showing the great progress which is being made in land settlement in New Zealand, the figures for the first nine months of the current financial year are in the highest degree satisfactory. There are, as you know, three systems in operation-cash purchase, occupation with right of purchase, and lease in perpetuity. During the past nine months 490 settlers have bought 25,814 acres for cash; 79,705 acres have been taken up by 348 selectors upon the occupation system with right of purchase, and 160,128 acres have been taken up by 716 persons upon lease in perpetuity. These figures show that the selectors and acreage are proportionately greater than last year, and they also disclose the fact that the system of lease in perpetuity is gaining in favour with the people. There is this great advantage in the perpetual lease system-that instead of people expending all their money in the purchase of land, and then having to go to loan companies for advances to enable them to procure seed, implements, and stock, they can reserve their capital for these purposes, and pay a rental at the rate of 4 or 5 per cent. upon the capital value of their selections. It has this additional advantage also

that it places land within the reach of people who have succeeded in saving very moderate amounts of money." Age."

Mr. Holyoake advocates, in an article entitled "The Taxation of Pleasure," appearing in the December number of the "Humani. tarian," a tax of a penny in the shilling on every ticket of admission to the theatre, &c., as a means of providing the funds for oldage pensions. Thoughtful writers like Mr. to overlook the science of economics in Holyoake and his lordly admirers seem apt making their otherwise estimable plans. A tax on theatre tickets would have first to fall on either of two persons-the theatre-goer or the Williamson. If it fell on the former, and he had to pay 1s. 1d. instead of 1s. for his ticket, he would, in most cases, go only 12 times a year instead of 13 times; or if it fell on the Williamson's, it would reduce the profit of their occupations, consequently their numbers, and the numbers of actors. In either case, the poor actor evidently has to suffer either a reduction in wages or possibly a total loss of employment. Why should Mr. Holyoake want to attempt to punish a man for a mental recreation both pleasant and healthful? And why, instead of singling out the poor actor, doesn't he try to tax the ground land. lords of the London theatres ?

There are many things which puzzle the observant mind, but that presented by the Prime Minister of the colony of Victoria, when he congratulated the community on the breakdown of its judicial system, is pro bably the most puzzling event one can think of.

What adds to its extraordinary cha racter and elevates it into the region of humour, is that Mr. Patterson was ap parently as innocent as a baby of the real

"DON" AND PHOENIX DARK TOBACCOES.

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