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whereas he could only make two per cent. as an owner. Can Lord Salisbury really suppose that the French, or the Belgian, or the Jersey peasants, who give much higher prices for land than are obtained in this country, are blind to their own interest? The first cause of peasant proprietorship is that where the great landlord makes Lord Salisbury's two per cent. by ownership, the peasant makes ten per cent. by security. Lord Salisbury puts the average price of agricultural land in England at 50l. an acre. I visited lately every farm I could find for sale in Jersey, and found the average about 1901. per acre. Lord Salisbury says of France: The land there is as dear as here.' I should say it is much dearer. Why? Because competition is extended to a class who can make so very much more out of possession than is possible for landlords owning upon the English system. Let us turn to unquestionable authority on this point, Mr. James Howard's work on Continental Farming and Peasantry. Subdivision in France is most notable in the north-west. M. Hamoir, the best known agriculturist of the department of the Nord, states that twenty-five acres are considered a large farm, and that, as in Jersey, ten acres may be taken as the average. M. Hamoir has known agricultural land in that department sold to peasant proprietors at 1921. an acre. As usual with large farmers, or great proprietors, he deprecates such an outlay; he thinks it better that the small farmer should not be a proprietor or landowner at the price he pays.' Then M. Hamoir, in a paraphrase of Lord Salisbury, says: The interest of his [the peasant's] money invested in ordinary securities would permit him to hire, even at a high rate, double the quantity of land that he could hold as an owner, but he does not enter upon this path.' This French peasant, taxed all over the world with morbid thrift, with unnatural frugality, is told that he is reckless in the outlay of his painful savings, and the M. Hamoirs look upon him as a stubborn, contumacious creature, with a wonderful faculty for existing on hard fare, and for raising the price of land, which last trait is very disagreeable when they desire to be purchasers. Is it likely to be true, is it reasonable to suppose, that the people who, generation after generation, have put sou to sou, and franc to franc, till a purse was made for purchase-is it not in fact silly to suggest that they would be duped in their expenditure? M. Hamoir, to do him justice, does not believe this, though he professes to trace such conduct in part to the ignorance' of the Continental peasantry. M. Hamoir gives, in Mr. Howard's pages, a subordinate place to that which is obviously the real and the sufficient motive. The purchase is, in truth, the result of prudence, not of ignorance. The peasants know that their unremitting labour will turn even sand to gold, and they know that there is but one way to security, that of ownership. As M. Hamoir puts it, the peasant buys because he fears the short duration of leases at the end of which he dreads to be ousted for some competitor."

There it is. That is the whole story; the full and complete justification of the peasant's prudence and judgment. To be secure he must be a proprietor. It is, I think, unworthy of Lord Salisbury— if only because he was draughtsman of the Lords' Report on Agriculture in 1873-to meet the claim for free land with the rejected and futile plea, that modern settlements contain a power of sale. That power has no analogy to a free sale of land, or to the simple responsibilities of freehold tenure. I am pretty well acquainted with Lord Salisbury's estate; I have walked over most, if not all, of his lordship's farms, and I can say that high farming is not the note' of Hatfield. Yet there is a fixed idea in the minds of most English landlords, that high farming and large farms are strictly connected; an idea which was very conspicuous in Mr. Froude's essay. I dealt at the time of its appearance with Mr. Froude's essay on 'The Uses of a Landed Gentry.' No one seems to have thought the economists, from Adam Smith to Mill, all wrong and Mr. Froude all right, and the essay has since been very appropriately placed among Short Studies of Great Subjects.

I repeat that the end of those who seek the establishment of free land is not the creation of a peasant proprietary. But they regard the fact that free land would have the result of greatly increasing the number of proprietors as a matter of political, social, and economic importance. They know that the demand for legislative changes will not be idly made; that the people at large must be convinced of the advantages: first, in regard to increase of production, and second, in regard to the closer association of a larger body of the people with the soil. Those who prophesy terrible things concerning the future of Russia will, I fancy, find themselves mistaken. Perhaps to the impossibility of exciting general revolution in Russia may be ascribed some part of the fanatical violence of a few who find no sympathy among the great mass of the population. The hold of the peasantry upon the soil of Russia will probably secure steadiness, though progress in so poor a country must needs be slow. It is well in this connection to observe that which the military correspondent of the Times (October 16, 1877) in Bulgaria wrote of the Russian soldier: 'A popular fallacy in England is that the Russian soldier lives in an atmosphere of blows-that the knout and the stick are his only ruling motives. The fact is that nowhere, not even among the Germans, is the soldier managed more entirely by moral means. A word, or even a look, from his officer suffices. He seems to feel a reproof-and it is rarely deserved-as much as an Englishman would a blow. The bulk of the Russian privates are themselves small landowners, and have an interest and a stake in the country accordingly.'

I see that in England there is a 'National Thrift Society,' of which the Lord Mayor of London has lately become a patron. How is it that we so grievously need, and that other populations have no

such need for, encouragement in carefulness? Is it not because our people are debarred from learning lessons of frugality from the land, the mother of all thrift? What is the first supreme lesson in economy, which, indeed, is taught to all people and to all countries, but least of all to the people of England? Is it not the dependence of man upon the harvest; is it not in the fact that there is a seedtime and a harvest; that there is no continual harvest; that store must be made for those seasons in which there is no harvest? The people who have been withheld from that school-the primest and chief of all schools have never displayed, and never will display, the cardinal virtues of thrift and frugality. In the subservience of our Legislature to the maintenance of those perishing laws and practices which favour the aggregation of land in a comparatively few families, there have been now and then displayed feeble and futile efforts to inculcate carefulness. But it would be as easy for well-meaning philanthropists to push this island from its solid foundations in the earth to a junction with France, as to make the English people thrifty so long as they are divorced from the soil. The true and the best National Thrift Society' will be composed of those who are the most earnest and the most successful in the demand for free land.

ARTHUR ARNOLD.

RITUALISTS AND ANGLICANS.

AMONGST the many hotly contested subjects of discussion which occupy the public mind in the present day, and with which its current literature is filled, the raison d'être, position, and future of Ritualism are not the least important. Assertion is confronted by assertion, argument by argument, until the minds of those who wish to comprehend the relative position of parties in the Church, and the justice of their respective claims, are completely bewildered.

What then is Ritualism, and who are the Ritualists? The original and accurate meaning of the term is, the science of, and the proficients in, the order and history of those forms which have grown up round the public worship of the Church. Such a one was Durandus; and from the extreme care for, and value of, stately and dignified forms of service shown by the advanced party in the Church, the name was originally given to them. But the essence of Ritualism consists, not in that carefulness for the order of service which is its leading motive in the eyes of the general public, but in its implied appeal to primitive antiquity for Church doctrine and practice. The Ritualists claim that their principles are the legitimate and logical outcome of the revival of 1830, the first object of which was to assert the long-forgotten truth of the Catholicity of the English Church, and to clear away the mists which Puritanism had, for a hundred years, drawn across the teaching of our early Reformers. The main position of the Ritualists is that, assuming the first stand-point of the early Tractarians, viz. the Catholicism of the English Church, as proved, the members of that Church inherit all privileges, usages, and rites common to all Branches of the Church, which are not specifically forbidden by her own Canons or Articles. Every jot and tittle of law, doctrine, and ritual, which were accepted by the Church prior to 1548, are, say they, ours now in 1880, except such as have been definitely rejected by the united action of Convocation and the proper State authority. In short, they claim for her as much right to the title and privileges of Catholics, as the Americans have to consider English history, down to the War of Independence, their own history.

Let us now see how this position is regarded by the other so-called schools of thought within the Church.

The Evangelical party meet the assumption of the Ritualists with a flat denial. They assert, on their side, that the work of the Reformation was to pull down the existing fabric of the Church, overgrown as it was with fallacious traditions and practices, and to reconstruct a Church founded on the teaching of the Bible and the Bible only.' They hold, in the main, that nothing is binding on the clergy of the English Church but what can be proved to have been held binding, and laid down afresh as such, by the Reformers and compilers of the Prayer-Book. And, following this out, they practically refuse to accept anything beyond, even on the authority of history, as binding on Christian people. They consider the teaching of the Ritualists pernicious, and their work harmful, because it is based on the principle that Catholic tradition and teaching are the heritage and should be the standard of the English Church, and because they hold that on the assumption alone of her claim to Catholicity can the authority of the Reformed Church be accepted at all. In their hearts, each party, we believe, respects and honours the other for the earnestness, devotion, and practical religion which both share, but opponents they are, and must, to all appearance, remain, while their fundamental principles of thought and action are so opposed that union or compromise seems to be impossible. And as, in political warfare, men think and speak strongly, while yet respecting and honouring their opponents, so with regard to the two opposite parties in the Church, words run high and strife is fomented between those who should be working side by side in the great work of reclaiming the populations of our large cities from the depths of ignorance and degradation.

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There is again another party within the Church, and this a large and influential one, which, though classed by the Evangelicals as one with the Ritualists, yet looks on the latter with much distrust, and which, while it will not altogether repudiate them, at least refuses them its hearty co-operation, standing aloof from the strife now going on. This is the High Church,'' Anglican,' or 'Moderate' party, variously so called to express the distinction between them and the Ritualists. The leaders of this party also claim for their adherents that they are the legitimate descendants of the Revivalists of 1830; and protest that they have adhered to the basis of that great movement, while the Ritualists have progressed, and, in progressing, have lost the original stand-point which formed the safeguard of that revival— the Prayer Book. They accuse the advanced party of disloyalty, of Romanising, of exceeding the teaching of the Prayer Book, and of indulging in eccentricities of Ritual, by the constituting of which as essential they are endangering the peace of the Church. They are, say the Anglicans, a new sect, not of us, and the tendencies of their teaching are nothing less than revolutionary. This School, in fact,

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