munity whose governors neglect or forget the most serious business of rulers, which is, to provide, not politics but, bread and butter for their people. Though the Birmingham school may scoff at this proposition, its certainty is established by all history. Familiar proofs of its truth are those terrible famines in China, India, and Ireland which within forty years have swept away, by the most painful of deaths, probably as many human beings as are counted to-day in Great Britain. Not as commonly known is the appalling fact that the proportion deaths bear to births is about twenty-five per cent, higher in Ireland than in England; a ratio of mortality among a healthy, vigorous race attributable solely to the " perennial destitution, accentuated by seasons of famine," that afflicts the lives of multitudes patriotism insists upon fastening with chains of steel unto the barren stones whereon they were born. Yet, surely, this is to despise or forget the second precept imposed in the beginning upon man. The world is wide, fertile; it is made for him, not man for it; he ought to fill it, to subdue it physically, socially, morally, spiritually; obeying his Creator he reaps the blessing wrapped up in promise under the idiom of the primeval law—he prospers.
One great English Liberal statesman recently recognized the doctrine affirmed in the first sentence of the preceding paragraph. Early in December, 1882, the Marquis of Ripon, in the course of a tour, received at Lucknow the talookdars, great landholders, of the province of Oude. The Viceroy reminded them that each held his land from the Imperial Government on the condition " that he shall, so far as is in his power, promote the agricultural prosperity of his estate. The primary and essential condition of agricultural prosperity is the well-being of the cultivators of the soil. To the promotion of that well-being the Government attaches importance of the highest kind. … The State is bound to provide for the well-being of all classes of its subjects."[1] After M. de Freycinet last took office he read a declaration embodying the political programme of the new Cabinet to the Chamber of Deputies, on January 31, 1882. This Liberal French Prime Minister promised that " the efforts of the Cabinet would be directed towards giving an impetus to labour: the moral, intellectual, and material improvement of the people would hold the first place in the thoughts of the Government, and the Cabinet would give an attentive study
- ↑ St.James' Gazette, December 11, 1882.
