From the Economist, 6th April. THE SALE OF RUSSIAN AMERICA TO THE UNITED STATES.

be shut out entirely from the Pacific, and Great Britain would cease to hold any possession whatever upon that ocean; but British Columbia is not the more likely to pass such a vote because of this cession. She cannot be threatened from Sitka, the village which serves as the capital to Russian America, and cannot be morally influenced by its possessors. Rather she is the less likely, because the colony will feel* more acutely its importance as a member of the Canadian system, and will obtain better terms, more energetic assistance, that is, towards the establishment of the work it most desires a practicable road across the continent from the Pacific to the St. Lawrence. Without British Columbia the new possession is so useless, and may be so expensive, that we do not wonder the Senate hesitates to ratify Mr. Johnson's Treaty.

THE sale of Russian America to the United States for a sum of 1,400,0001, which was announced to the Senate by the President last week, is, we think, rather a curious than an important political event. The territory, though very large, as large as six or seven Englands, adds little or nothing to the material resources of its new proprietors. It produces no revenue, and it is very unlikely that, even in American hands, it ever will produce any. It may possess, probably does possess, valuable mines, but the climate is too cold for colonization, and without colonization the mines, even if worked by criminals under sentence of penal servitude, can never be of considerable value. It has a trade, we believe, with San Francisco in ice, but an ice trade, like Still the event is a curious one. It is a trade in diamonds or pearls, is a mere very unusual, quite unprecedented as far as trade in luxuries, and serves no commercial we know, for Russia to part voluntarily with purpose except to enrich a very few in- territory of any kind. Her idea hitherto dividuals. Fur-bearing animals exist, but has been supposed to be to conquer the they are few, and the climate is so severe world," that is, to possess herself gradually that the whole territory has been leased to of every territory which did not cost too the Hudson's Bay Company, the greatest much either in battle or in cash. This cesfur dealers in the world, for a moderate sum, sion shows that her rulers do not apply and when their last lease expired, they were this theory to America; that they recognize not anxious to renew it. It is not probable the right of the Washington Cabinet to obthat the revenue from all sources will ever tain, if it can, the whole of the North be equal to the maintenance of one consid- American continent. It shows also that erable military post. The inhabitants, they are very willing to make friends of again, are few, about 75,000, more or less, the Americans, whether with a view to mariand of those few the majority are Esqui- time assistance, as some people believe, or to maux, who are a burden rather than an ad- other forms of aid, is uncertain, but certainvantage, while the remainder are Russians, ly with some possibly half developed view. who will probably return to their own coun- The mere right of entering American ports try, and half-castes of little more value than might, under certain circumstances, be valthe Esquimaux. Nor has the ceded terri- uable to the fleet which Russia usually maintory any special advantage of geographical tains in Chinese waters, and she has designs position. The compiler of the telegraphic in China which the power in possession of bulletin announcing the President's message San Francisco might greatly facilitate. We to the Senate, does indeed say that the ces- are apt to forget, that considerable as the sion blocks up British Columbia; but he distance may be, California looks straight might as well say the cession of Argyleshire across the water to Japan and Shanghai. would block up Liverpool. British Colum- Some such view must, it is clear, have been bia has as many outlets to the sea as it ever in her ruler's mind, for her American terrihad, the only district which is even appar- tory is not a burden, and the sum offered ently affected being divided by a broad by the Washington Government is no channel from the Aleutian Islands. Van- temptation. Russian finances are not, we couver's Island, by far our most valuable believe, very flourishing, but still a million possession on the coast, is miles away to the south. No doubt, if British Columbia voted itself first independent and then a part of the American Union, the consequences might be much more serious. The Canadian Confederation, and the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company would then

is far too small a sum to be a serious inducement. She could have obtained it from Amsterdam by a telegram, and not on very harsh terms. Then the American Government must have taken considerable trouble about this cession, and have taken it very secretly. Correspondence must have passed

for some time between Mr. Cassius Clay great direct importance, it may by increasand Mr. Seward, and that correspondence ing the American desire to annex Canada, has been very assiduously kept secret. and diminishing the Canadian reluctance These things denote intention, and as Rus- to be annexed, prove ultimately of some sian America is in itself of no value, the in- moment. Still, even then, England has no tention must be to obtain any portion of the plea or reason for interference or remonNorth American continent which may, at strance. Russia has a right to sell uninhabitthe moment, be obtainable, under the idea ed wildernesses if she likes, and America to that it will, when the remainder has been buy them without giving us any umbrage, secured, fall into its proper place. That is and we have long since disclaimed the right not very pleasant for Englishmen, who re- to dictate to Canada as to her future policy. member that they are second among Ameri- So long as she claims our aid, we shall fight can proprietors in wealth and importance, for her as for any other guaranteed ally; and in mere area the very first. It is but if she chooses to vote herself indepennot nice to know that your neighbour, the dent, she has only to communicate that landed millionaire, intends some time or resolution in constitutional and courteous other to have your farms, because it suggests form. We shall, we fear, one day repent that he may be tempted at some convenient that this decision, which is, we believe, enmoment to try to make you part with them. dorsed by all statesmen of all parties, was The mere design does not greatly help him not formally included in the new Act of towards his end, but it does not tend to Confederation, but the danger of that omisprolong amity, or to smooth away the inevi- sion is not increased by the American actable occasions of quarrel. The possession ceptance or rejection of the sovereignty of of Russian America does not constitute a a few more square miles of ice-bound hills, new inducement for the Union to conquer or a few thousands more of Indian hunters, Canada, but it does offer a new inducement and half caste dealers in fur. to Americans to tempt Canada into annexation. To be masters of a Continent is a very taking ambition, and, with Canada in the Union, and Russian America purchased, the Americans would be masters of a Continent, direct masters from the Rio Grande to the Pole, and indirect masters from the Isthmus to the Straits of Kamschatka.

We can easily imagine that the purchase may increase the hankering, just as the purchase of an out-lying-farm by a great proprietor increases his hankering to join it on to the body of his estate. And we can imagine, too, that the possession may diminish Canadian reluctance to enter the Union. Men are greatly moved by their imaginations, and to be part proprietors of a Continent, to feel themselves seated for ever on two great oceans, finally beyond the reach or possibility of attack, or menace, or intrigue, is a prospect which would move any men, which would speedily move men who, like the Canadians and Americans, have been trained by circumstances to connect the ideas of bigness and of grandeur. To live under the idea that a neighbouring State of almost irresistible power intends to annex you in the end, is very trying to politicians, as the people of Belgium know, and many among them may be tempted, like many among Belgians, to end the irritation by joining that State, instead of waiting in suspicious preparation until the junction is effected without their consent.

While, therefore, the cession is not of any

From The Economist.

GANG LABOUR IN THE FEN COUNTRY.

THERE is, perhaps, no fact in English politics more important or less generally understood, than the existence of deep chasms or rifts in our social civilisation. People comprehend in a vague way that we have among us classes with "very little education," or classes with none at all, but they seldom realise to themselves what that means, or remember how very many English people grow up to manhood and womanhood without any civilisation at all. London was perfectly startled by the revelations of an amateur casual, hardly believed the statements in the Blue Book about tramps, and will, we doubt, at heart suspect the gentlemen who have just reported on gang labour in Lincolnshire and the Eastern counties, of unconscious exaggeration. The evidence in this last case, however, is unusually complete, complete enough to demonstrate beyond all cavil the existence among us of many thousands of persons as uncivilised as the natives of newly-discovered islands. The reporters employed by the Home Office to inquire into the effects of the system of gang labour commonly employed in the Fen country, report, on testimony almost unanimous, facts which may be thus condensed.

the sexes.

In the marshy districts of Lincolnshire, Hun-guishes morality. Or, to put it more accutingdon, and the Eastern counties, some rately, it prevents a generation, which would, seven thousand children are employed, under any circumstances, be coarsely bred, chiefly in weeding, on a system but little from even acquiring that faint tincture of cidiffering from prædial slavery. Idle labour-vilisation which secures, if not refinement, at ers, or labourers of indifferent character, least external decency; if not chastity, at collect gangs of children of all ages from least some regulation on the intercourse of among the cottages, paying the parents so the sexes. They become savages without much a week for each, and hire their gangs that unconsciousness of law which in savages out to neighbouring farmers. The children has been so often mistaken for innocence, are marched in the morning to their work with just so much consciousness as to feel often six miles off, compelled to toil for ten delight in insulting all more decent than hours under fear of oaths and blows, and themselves. Persons by no means overthen marched back in the dusk, tired to the refined themselves declared to the Commispoint of utter exhaustion. Girls are em- sioners that the gangs were public nuisanployed as well as boys, all ages are welcome, ces, sources as well as centres of pollution, and no attempt is made at any separation of so bad that they made the public roads imThe gang masters are very sel- passable; and even the farmers who benefit dom decent persons, and find the trouble of by the labour, admit and deplore the moral exacting sufficient work quite as much as consequences of the system. Nevertheless, they can manage, and leave the children it has a tendency to extend. The gangs offer when the work is done to their own inclina- a supply of very cheap and very obedient tions and devices. Wholly uneducated, ac- labour; the cottagers in many villages are customed to cottages where all ages and both so wretchedly off that an addition of 6d. or sexes are huddled together like animals, 8d. a day to their wages is irresistibly atcompelled when in the fields to do every-tractive, and the tone of manners, if not of thing in public, the children never acquire morals, is still in many districts wretchedly the most rudimentary sense of decency. It low. The clergymen who give evidence all is not so much that they become immoral as that they do not know what morals are. They are beneath the morals. They are never permitted to rise out of the stage of life, in which obscenity seems amusing, chastity unnatural, delicacy a useless encumbrance. Forced into incessant companionship with the opposite sex, wearied with toils so severe that it kills the girls and hardens the boys into gipsies, with no external restraint, and no idea that restraint is useful, both sexes slide altogether out of civilisation bathe together, sleep together huddled in barns to avoid the toil of walking home, and vie with each other in obscenity of phrase and gesture. So utterly degraded do they become, that even labourers inured to cottages with one room to each family, coarse of speech, and callous of feeling, are revolted by their behaviour, and re-geability Act. fuse to allow their daughters to enter the fields except when compelled by actual want. This drives the gang masters back on a still more debased class - girls who have early lost their characters, women who never had any characters to lose, the most ruffianly or the least educated of the village lads, to whom, as several witnesses testify, the license of the gangs is the real attraction. The evil, therefore, intensifies itself until it is proved on the testimony of dozens of clergymen, surgeons, and decent labourers, that the introduction of gang labour in any village extin

report that the children employed in the gangs are worse than ordinary cottagers, but they almost all admit and lament the fashion in which they are brought up, and which renders civilisation almost impossible. Even mothers who gave evidence against the system, say they yield to it for the sake of the money it brings, and the only defence is characteristic of a general lowness of moral tone. This is, that the viciousness of the gangs is not the result of gang labour, but only a very patent exhibition of the universal coarseness and depravity of the agricultural poor. Then the system enables such land owners who own whole parishes to pull down most of their cottages, and thus relieve themselves in great measure of poor rates, a device which has only become useless since the passing of Mr. Charles Villiers' Union Char

It is, of course, easy to put a stop to this particular cause of demoralisation. The practice of forming children into gangs only extends over a few districts, and those who profit by it would themselves be glad to see the employment of girls in gangs prohibited by law. But the root of the evil will not, we greatly fear, be touched until agricultural cottages are better built, and education has become much more universal. No two villages are quite alike; but, in what is called a bad village, the civilisation is usually

been used before. His studies have purified his taste, not lumbered his memory, therefore he comes to a common subject with simplicity and directness, as if he were the first to treat it. If the thought is familiar it seems fresh by its fitness; if the simile is new it seems familiar by its truth. It would be hard to name another writer so little conscious of his art.

very thin indeed. Lord Leicester, in a speech | edge of literature which tempts one to quoted with great approval by the Com- avoid a natural metaphor because it has missioners, admitted that even on his own well-managed estate, it is absolutely necessary to compel the cottagers to abstain from taking lodgers, or they will overcrowd them until neither decency nor comfort are in any way possible; and in "open" parishes, this crowding is sometimes carried to such an extent that two families occupy one room. It is only by the building of cottages on a great scale that this can be prevented; and cottage building is, unfortunately, not remunerative, and will not be until some cause like emigration has forced on a general rise in agricultural wages. Till then, however we may legislate, large numbers of agricultural labourers will, we fear, remain in a condition very little above that of the peas antry in Turkey or Bengal, with moral senses blunted by circumstances, no time for education, and very little inclination to find pleasure in anything higher than animal enjoyment.

From the Daily Advertiser.
THE MAGNOLIA.

sec

If Dr. T. W. Parsons had nursed his literary reputation as many a writer of inferior merit has done, his estimation as a poet by the multitude would be, to-day, what it is by the discriminating few ond to none in America. His poems hitherto printed consist chiefly of the first half (seventeen cantos) of Dante's Inferno translated into English verse, with a large number of original pieces, some of which have been collected at the instigation, or by the care, of friends, and some of which are still to be sought in newspapers and magazines.

Twenty-two poems by Dr. Parsons have been collected and privately printed in a handsome quarto, of forty-eight pages, called The Magnolia. At the top of the first cover is the date, 1866; at the bottom, the name of the poet; in the centre, a representation in gold, exquisitely designed, of the magnolia flower amidst its outlined leaves. The poems are curious neither in theme nor expression. In them, our common, and therefore deepest feelings are clothed in natural language and illustrated by apt and obvious images. Dr. Parsons does not write with that conscious knowl

The Magnolia. T. W. Parsons. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1866. 4to, pp. 58.

Of these pieces, with the exception perhaps of four, the theme is the purest of human sentiments, friendship. With a warm, confident hand, he grasps his friend's hand at parting; he sends him manly words across the sea; the gifts of game and wine are made to praise only the giver; his worship of women never degenerates into maudlin protestations of indecent passion, but ennobles the worshipper and glorifies the divinity. Exquisite are the wreaths' he has laid on the bier of childhood, beauty, genius and heroism. In the Epitaph on a Child" he writes:

"And when we garnered in the earth,
The foison that was ours,
We felt that burial was but birth

To spirits, as to flowers."

It was he who wrote of Mary Booth in stanzas worthy of a place in Grey's Ele

gy:

"Know that her spirit to her body lent

Such sweetness, grace, as only goodness can;
That even her dust, and this her monument,
Have yet a spell to stay one lonely man,

"Lonely through life, but looking for the day
When what is mortal of himself shall sleep;
When human passion shall have passed away,
And love no longer be a thing to weep."

It was he who caught in that "Dirge for one who fell in battle," the very spirit of Moschu's

Begin, ye pastoral muses, the lament,
And nightingales and swallows whom he loved,

when he wrote

"Room for the soldier! lay him in the clover;
He loved the fields, and they shall be his cover;
Make his mound with hers who called him once
her lover;

Where the rain may rain upon it,
Where the sun may shine upon it,
Where the lamb hath lain upon it,
And the bee will dine upon it."

these gigantic periodicals that nearly every thing of importance in Russian literature makes its first appearance, and a translated selection from their principal articles would form the best means of introducing the mind of modern Russia to the English public. To pay it every attention would be only to return the compliment it pays to us. We observe that in the essays of the Russian critic Druzhenin, which are now being reprinted in a collected form, like those of Jeffrey and Macaulay, the fifth volume contains articles on Currer Bell's Villette,' on Thackeray's Newcomes,' on Wilkie Collins's No Name,' on Lawrence's

The Russian Publishers' Circular, the Knizh- | English review in its quartely issue. It is in nuiy Viestnik, or Book Intelligencer, has, in one of its numbers for 1866, a curious table of the number of volumes published at different places in Russia in the years 1863 and 1864. The grand total is 1,652 volumes in 1863, and 1,836 volumes in the following year. The number of places of publication was forty one in the first year, beginning with St. Petersburg, and ending with Kiakhta, the trading town on the Chinese frontier; and forty-six in the second; and in that year we regret to say Kiakhta, which only published one volume in 1863, appears to have emitted nothing. St. Petersburg is the great literary centre, furnishing 951 and 1,097 volumes in the successive years; Moscow fol-Barren Honour,' on Trollope's Orley Farm,' lows, with 459 in the first year, and 432 — a decrease in the second; Odessa, Kiev, Kharkov, Tiflis, &c. follow at very respectful distances; and the remaining towns- - Irkutsk, Astrakhan, Archangel, &c., figure in general for two or three works respectively; but, as the table is founded on the lists published in the Knizhnuiy Viestnik itself, it may probably be the case that its own omissions in recording their appearance may be the origin of the apparent paucity of provincial publications. St. Petersburg is, as we learn from another article, the place of publication of no less than 143 periodicals; Moscow, of 31; while the rest of the Empire furnishes 158, many of which are, however, vehicles of local intelligence described by the Knizhnuiy Viestnik as mere waste paper. The St. Petersburg periodicals are of a very different character, many of them surpassing any English periodical in extent and furnishing more matter in a monthly number than any

on George Eliot's 'Romola,' on Dr. Russell, the Times Correspondent, and a host of other subjects of English interest. It would surely be of some interest to know what "the lion thinks of us."

WE have to thank Messrs. Bell and Daldy for tastefully and prettily illustrated editions of Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone, Longfel low's Evangeline and Tales of a Wayside Inn, and Goldsmith's Poetical Works, with an introductory essay, by Mr. Edmund Forster Blanchard. The four volumes are admirably got up, and the illustrations are by Birket Foster, Absolon, Harrison, Weir, Gilbert, Tenniel, and others. The only complaint we have to make is that the church at page 121 of the White Doe reappears without a change at page 13 of the Wayside Inn, but for all that the books are exquisite. - Spectator.