The crests of the

Europe, nor secure any lasting national life. Balkans have little enough to do with the plains below; and does any one in his senses believe that the essentially unaggressive Turkish soldier, carefully watched over, as he will be, by officers responsible to the European Commission, would be guilty of violence to the armed and drilled Bulgar? The ever favourite game of Russia is the waiting-game; let the Bulgarians follow her example, and prove that they too can wait; so sure as they do, they will win the day in the end. Gradually, slowly I hope, for therefore surely, they will arrive at complete and matured independence. Solidified, tried, refined, and self-collected, they will be a real true Nation: then, then they will be able to say to Russian Bulgaria, Throw off the yoke of the Czar: join with us, and let us be one, united, free Bulgaria !'

6

EMILY, VISCOUNTESS STRANGford.

ROCKS AHEAD AND HARBOURS OF
REFUGE.

SOME five or six years ago I ventured under the allusive, but not inappropriate pseudonym of Cassandra to call attention to a few of the dangers which appeared to me to threaten our social well-being in some very material points. My representations excited considerable notice, and produced several replies. The country, however, had then been revelling in a long period of almost unexampled prosperity, and was little inclined to listen to gloomy forebodings or to criticisms of a disparaging character, or to take cognisance of the small clouds on the horizon scarcely bigger than a man's hand,' which appeared to me ominous of coming storm and darkness. Indications of mischief, which could not be altogether denied, I was held to have exaggerated; I was generally regarded as a prophet of evil, constitutionally disposed to look at everything en noir; and on the whole my warnings met with little more belief or practical recognition than did those of my namesake in the days of Troy. Since the publication of my first note of caution a marked 'change has come over the spirit of our dream;' the small cloud has overspread a very considerable part of the sky, the prevalent prosperity of 1872 has been replaced by heavy losses and by distress at once wide-spread and severe; commercial activity has been succeeded by commercial stagnation, disaster, and alarm; and, speaking generally, the spirit of sanguine selfconfidence and self-satisfaction characteristic of Englishmen in their periods of sunshine is giving way to a tone of depression and uneasiness not perhaps more dignified, but at least of more hopeful augury for the future, and indicative of a mood of mind in which warnings are more likely to be listened to. 'Sweet'-not are but may be-the uses of adversity;' and assuredly the lessons of the last two or three years, harsh enough, no doubt, have neither been few, nor trivial, nor conveyed in language difficult to read. On the deplorable and unsuspected unsoundness in certain circles of the mercantile and monetary world, revealed by the disasters of 1878, I am not going to dwell, nor do I wish to enter on the unprofitable and irritating field of mere party politics, though both might furnish texts for sermons more than ordinarily impressive. But I think I am justified, by the

bearing of late facts upon two of my former warnings, in reminding my readers, first, that we have been under the management of Ministers, who, rightfully or wrongfully, wisely or unwisely, have changed the spirit of British policy; who, in doing this, and by their mode of doing it, have given great offence and, as far as can be yet discovered, have achieved no beneficent aims, but have created or exasperated bitter enmities in three quarters of the globe; who, in the pursuit of this course of action, have increased expenditure heavily and enhanced taxation somewhat, though how much no one can predict and few have the courage honestly to calculate, but enough at least to change a surplus into a deficit;-and who (which is to our more immediate purpose), in acting thus and entailing these consequences on the country, have been supported, cheered, hounded on, and glorified, not only by the residuum,' but by a majority of those electors whose ignorance, thoughtlessness, and excitable temperament I ventured to point out as valid reasons against too hastily endowing them with that electoral franchise which in the judgment of all Liberals they have so sadly misused.

The second point relates to the various dangers which I enumerated as threatening the economic and productive supremacy of Great Britain, unless our artisan classes could be warned and moralised in time. These warnings were unhappily disregarded for the most part by those classes themselves, and made light of or absolutely denied by too many not only of their professional leaders, but of their more sanguine advocates and advisers among philanthropic natures. The probability of foreign rivalry was not believed in, or was treated as at least distant and problematic; the alleged deterioration of British labour was stoutly contested; in the undeniably unfortunate disputes between the workmen and their employers it was maintained that the former were generally right or that the objects they aimed at were at all events desirable and probably attainable; while it was confidently urged that the artisans might be trusted to understand and manage their own interests better than their masters could do for them. The experience of the last two years, and more especially the disastrous proceedings of 1878, have lowered the confident tone of the soberer among the workmen's friends, and brought about, more speedily than I had hoped and far more painfully than I could wish, a recognition of many facts once noisily denied, and justified assuredly nearly all the neglected warnings of Cassandra. The state of trade has been stagnant, gloomy, and disastrous in the extreme, and it cannot be denied that much of its deplorable condition has been immediately traceable to the specific causes which I pointed out as so ominous in the approaching times. But still less can it be controverted—indeed it is almost universally admitted-that this condition has been enormously aggravated by the almost incredible blunders and perversity of the working classes themselves, all the more disheartening because

the true facts and bearings of the case have been fairly and anxiously laid before them by friends whose sincere and well-proved sympathy should have secured at least a patient hearing.

It has been shown by practical proofs and special instances that the possibility and even imminence of foreign competition in more than two or three of our established industries, which I asserted some years ago, has turned out anything but unreal or exaggerated. It is needless, and would perhaps be tedious, to cite examples or to go into details; they are notorious to all who have followed the disturbances and conflicts which led to such ruinous losses and so much ill-blood during the last year. Orders and contracts, which might have given adequate, and possibly even profitable, occupation to our artisans, had over and over again to be declined by capitalists here, and were taken up in continental countries, simply because the men, while fully recognising the disastrous state of trade, obstinately refused to accept adequate reduction in rates of wages which were legitimate and possible only in prosperous times, and virtually insisted on a selfish and unjust exemption from sharing in the misfortunes of their employers. It has proved ineffectual to remind them that the loss of orders and contracts, thus caused and thus begun, means in the end, and probably an early end, the loss of the entire trade thus rashly played with; and that foreign rivals, thus gratuitously despised, will not readily give up what our folly has once thrown into their hands.

Similar incomprehensible and suicidal errors have pervaded the proceedings of nearly the whole of the artisan classes during the past year, and, curiously enough, of many of the best paid miscellaneous labourers as well. Some of their most energetic friends have endeavoured to persuade and enlighten them, but hitherto almost entirely without success. Strikes have been all but universal; at least, they have been the rule rather than the exception. They have been attended by two peculiar features, both condemnable, but one certainly, though not quite unprecedented, never so general or so prominent or so incontrovertible as of late. The first is, the extent to which the funds of the Unions have been lavished on strike-pay,' I might say unwarrantably lavished, because the original intention of these funds was to lay up resources for interrupted employment, or 'bad times,' or failure of earnings during sickness or accident, though often no doubt, of late especially, levies from wages have been ostensibly made and avowedly collected distinctly for the purpose of supporting trade disputes and strikes. The amount of these funds thus wasted must be reckoned by hundreds of thousands of poundstaking in the whole, perhaps by millions. To this extent have the

1 We have no reliable means of knowing the aggregate amount of the funds collected by these Unions, nor the mode of their expenditure. One of their principal defenders, however, has given some figures which show how large they must be. VOL. V.-No. 27. 3 I

savings of the operatives been simply thrown away; the operatives themselves impoverished and disheartened, and prevented from in time becoming capitalists, which some at least of them no doubt must have looked forward to.-The other feature is, that these strikes against a reduction of wages (here and there even for an advance, incredible as it may seem) were almost universally and obviously hopeless, and usually recognised avowedly as such by the leaders of the workmen themselves. They had no justification whatever, not even a plausible one, nor, as far as could be discovered, any distinct meaning whatever. The mere fun of fighting seemed to some the motive cause. Other less charitable observers were inclined to regard the real causa causans to be the necessity felt by their official chiefs for assigning in action a presentable reason for their own existence. But without recurring to any such discreditable suggestion, this much at least is certain, that while, in times of brisk trade and large demand and scanty supply of labour, strikes are often warrantable and usually successful-if indeed differences between the contending parties are then suffered to reach the point of striking— strikes in periods of stagnant and unprofitable business like 1878, when mills, and collieries, and furnaces, and foundries by the score are stopped or put upon short time, are foredoomed to failure, and are therefore self-condemned. In a word, they indicate and establish one of three conclusions-often and probably all three; either grievous misguidance of the artisans by their advisers; or, that the artisans have altogether escaped from the control of their recognised leaders; or, as is more frequently the case than is believed, that the wiser counsels of the older men have been overpowered by the rashness of the younger unmarried men, who either do not remember or have refused to profit by the experience of former struggles and the sufferings they entailed.

The more buoyant of the critics who contested my former warnings, even while admitting the basis of truth they might contain, insisted that they were unwarrantably over-coloured; that the people were growing wiser and better educated year by year; especially were becoming rapidly conversant with sounder notions of political economy; that I had no right to appeal to past blunders as indicative Mr. George Howell states in a recent article in Fraser's Magazine, that the expen diture of four of the greatest of these associations in 1877 reached 215,6647., 'exclusive of strike-pay' he says. Of this 126,0007. or more than one-half was distributed to men out of work.' The accumulated 'funds in hand' of these four societies he states to be 446,3237. The payments which produce these funds are said to be only 18. a week per head, and the strike-pay to vary from 10s. to 15s. (Fraser's Magazine, January 1879.) The great masons' strike in London, which collapsed after a conflict of thirty weeks, began, it is reported, with a special levy of 3007. a week, and a balance in hand of 15,000l., and after spending, it is calculated, about 50,000, has left nearly 500 men permanently out of work. (Capital and Labour, March 20, 1878.) Another return, but evidently an imperfect one, gives 250,0007, as the annual income (aggregate) of the larger Unions.