mechanical calculation; and, in course of time, it must have a modifying effect upon human character.

But machinery has a further influence, too relevant not to be mentioned, though it may not be absolutely necessary to the main arguments. If the substitution of calculated mechanical forces for the fitful impulses of the unaided muscles quiets the emotions, the way in which machinery fixes the processes and favours the division of labour destroys its intellectual character. Labour, when it meant the completion of an article of production by one pair of hands, involved little difficulties which required the exercise of ingenuity; but labour, in the case of the bulk, is now becoming unskilled in the sense of contrivance and original resource being called for. All that has to be done will soon be, simply to give a lever a jerk here, and to throw up a strap there, without any choice of how it shall be done; and, indeed, the introduction of anything like originality into your movements is already rewarded by a ruinous crash; the machine resents such partnership, and comes to a standstill. Thought is growing to be less and less required in manufacturing processes; one man thinks what is necessary once for all, and embodies the thought in iron. Labour is, consequently, becoming more and more mechanical, even where it is yet partly manual, and the intellect, as well as the passions, is kept in abeyance in modern toil. And it is not only that the action of the reasoning faculties is not needed, but the infinitesimal division of the process makes the use of the imagination almost impossible. Supposing a Birmingham workman completed a whole pin, he might please his fancy as he laboured by wondering what shawl it would hold fast, what dainty fingers might play around it; but now that he only makes the head, and somebody he does not even know is shaping the point in another shop, while a third party elsewhere, unacquainted with either of them, will affix the parts, his imagination is hampered. He may, it is true, spend his minute intervals of leisure in wondering what pin-point his pin-head will come to match with, but that is not so lively a conception as the other. Even the machinists themselves have to work blindly; for cranks are made at one factory, and pistons at another place, and boilers in a different part of the country. Artisan labour, speaking generally, absorbs a continually decreasing quantity of the workman's thought, and, in fact, so far as the brain and the emotions are concerned, is becoming a state of rest instead of exhaustion. The grave question is, what will the final effect of this be? does it point to the passions and the intellect sinking into comparative quietude, or does it indicate that in the future men's thoughts, released from following the minute operations of their own hands, will, free from this drudgery, be left fresh for more general views of principles, and that the emotions, no longer exhausted in man's solitary toil, must find their gratification in social life during his greater leisure? These suggestions seem to afford limits of a loftier civilization; but we have not yet exhausted the consideration of the case itself. Machinery is not

confined to constructions of iron; there are social organizations which may fairly be classed under the head of machinery. The comparatively perfect modern police system, and the more detailed administration of the laws, providing quick redress for all grievances, and leaving nothing in the way of personal defence to the private citizen; the establishment of Joint Stock Companies, and the enlarging of the scale of business until transactions become impersonal; the regularity introduced into our movements by the creation of the railways; all these, together with other arrangements, combine to abate the action of the passions. How this is done may be explained in very few words.

The passions only operate within a narrow range, and personal contact, or, at least, a process of individualizing the objects of them, is requisite to excite them. You could not be angry at carbonic acid gas, no matter what injury it did, nor could you cherish much hatred against a defaulting corporation, if you had no knowledge of its members. Your wrongs must be made definite, and the agents of them be individualized, if the passions are to come into play in any effective manner. But the scale of commercial operations has grown so large, and social dealings in many ways have become so indirect, that this sense of personality, or any possibility of individualizing those with whom you have to deal, is greatly limited. System, which is machinery, is everywhere obtaining. You insure your life with persons you never saw; if you like, you may put your savings into the post-office, and do your thrift wholly inside letters; you may trade for a dozen years with firms all over the country, and not personally know a member of any one of them. All sense of personal dealings is vanishing out of our commercial transactions; they are becoming merely intellectual calculations with which the emotions have little to do. Nor is it only of trading matters that this holds good. If a man has to voyage to the world's end, he does not now go to pick out the ship by the look of it, and try to make the prior acquaintance of the captain to whom his life and fortune are to be entrusted; but he refers to a list of the shipping advertisements, and the utmost he can do, in the shape of exercising individual judgment, is to reflect which steam-packet company has a reputation for fewest accidents. This, no doubt, is safer than if he selected his own vessel by the mere fancy for its hull or the style of its figure-head, and relied upon the captain on account of his bluff voice and cheery look; the only point I wish to bring out is that in the one case his emotions would be exercised, and that in the other they are not. When we used to travel by coach we were in the habit of taking an interest in the driver, but now when we step into a railway train, who thinks what sort of man they have for engineer? Not the oldest of old women ever refuses to enter, and says, "I will not be driven by that man!" The extent to which we can go in the use of our own wits is to think that it is the interest of the company to arrange so as to avoid accidents because of the damages they involve; and so we may have a mental confidence of our safety;

but the feelings are blind, and cannot act a whit. This mechanical character, in great measure, applies to the whole range of modern operations. Take the very extremest case by way of illustration—that of war. War is now carried on without the play of the passions; battles are fought out by the aid of rifled guns at distances where the opposing armies never see each others' eyes; and the combatants only learn from the general orders of the next day which side won. Where are now the rage and the terror of personal conflict? What has become of the noise,

of the shouting, and the thunder of the captains? They grow fainter and fainter, and the passions die away out of the mechanic struggle. For the same reasons, the immense constructive feats we now do fail greatly to enlist the feelings, and only, as it were, titillate the intellect. Consider the height of our viaducts, the span of our bridges, the size of our ships,-the world has seen nothing to compare with them; but our emotions are not exercised by them in proportion. How can they be? The works are done by "Co.s," and even in the achieving of the feats, several monster abstractions are now partners; so that it becomes uncertain for how much of what is effected man should be praised, and how much of the credit is due to steam, electricity, and chemistry. Everything is settling down into matter of intellectual inquiry merely; we puzzle our wits about modern achievements, not bow our hearts before them.

The general conclusion I arrive at is, that, owing to mechanical causes operating with cumulating force in modern society, the passions are destined to weaken and fade, and life to become more and more an intellectual process. In their nature, some of the stronger emotions indicate that they are but temporary qualities of human character, only useful as makeshifts, pending the fuller development of reason, and wise men have always aimed at their suppression. Who associates them with his ideas of a state hereafter? No doubt, even rage and hate have their uses so long as men are without adequate knowledge of the mutuality of their interests, and have to depend upon physical force for their defence; but though they are defensive instincts, they are eradicable, as most systems of ethics have assumed more or less distinctly, and the Christian scheme completely. The important fact I have been trying to bring out is, that this is no longer solely dependent on moral persuasion. I submit that the introduction of machinery, the diminution of the sense of personal dealing out of commercial transactions, and the perfecting of our administrative system, establishing everywhere the triumph of the laws, are what may be termed mechanical influences operating with gradually increasing effect in enforcing a comparative inaction of the passions, and that in the repose of the feelings this secured religion may be expected to have freer scope than it has ever had previously-the two causes conjoined pointing to a degree of civilization far beyond the range of our present conceptions. Men will necessarily grow milder, and life will be embellished by the quieter feelings, purified and enlarged, while the rougher, turbulent emotions will die away.

548

The Economics of Country Life.

I. INITIAL.

Or all the changes which this century has seen perhaps the most remarkable has been the breaking down of the boundary lines which divided the town from the country. Not a hundred years ago Lancashire was almost as much a terra incognita to the Londoner as the Fiji-I beg pardon, the Viti Islands-are to Englishmen of the present day. And to the countryman London was a wonder and a mystery. Hodge, the farm labourer, inhabiting "the Sheeres," had heard speak of it as of a city full of pitfalls to the unwary, a city whose streets were paved with gold. But he no more thought of beholding it with the eyes of the flesh than he did of travelling at the rate of forty miles an hour. And Hodge's master, the squire, when he came up to town on rare occasions, was as much an alien as if he had been born in Algeria. He was a stranger among his own countrymen; a man of a different garb, and different habits. And to the thorough-bred Cockney the country was equally strange. To him every farm labourer was a swain, every milkmaid a nymph. He finds himself amongst the Derbyshire hills, and is astonished at their stupendous height, and terrified by their steepness. But a century has seen all this entirely changed. Old women from Cornwall come up to the Exhibition, jostle you in omnibuses, and know to a penny the fare from Charing Cross to the Bank. And City men are pretty well up in wheat and mangolds, think scorn of Mr. Mechi's balance-sheet, and possibly do a little bit of farming themselves before breakfast, ere they start on a forty-miles' ride to their place of business.

In fact country life with City people has become a passion, and consequently country pleasures, shooting, fishing, gardening, farming, have become a trade. A good trout stream, anywhere near a large town, is quite a little fortune to its owner, if he chooses to let the fishing. And not the least amusing reading of the Field newspaper is to be found in its advertising columns; for there lies spread open before the reader a chart of the occupations and pleasures of country life, the wants of would-be country people, and the supply which is always ready to meet that demand-for capital, like Nature, abhors a vacuum. So that when we see on one page, "Wanted a small country-house suitable for a genteel family, with a few acres of land about it, and, if possible, shooting and fishing in the neighbourhood," we are pretty certain that the next page will offer us "A small but commodious country-house, suitable for a genteel family, with," &c. The genteel family, therefore, have evidently nothing to do but to apply to A.B.C., to find every requirement fulfilled.

We will presume that they do so. Paterfamilias-of course, taking Materfamilias with him-goes off at once to inspect the house, which is small, but commodious enough; the land, some fifty acres, we will say, lies close by, in a ring fence; the stabling is good and convenient; the garden a gem; a pretty stream, well stocked with fish, runs through the grounds. And there is shooting to be rented at a reasonable rate in the neighbourhood. Paterfamilias closes with the bargain at once, and as to stocking the farm, and putting a good horse into that comfortable loose box, and getting the garden into the very best order-why there are hundreds of advertisements in every week's newspaper, which offer everything that any genteel family can need. Paterfamilias, of course, takes in the Field, and, glancing at the advertising columns, it almost seems to him that mankind in general have set themselves to the business of supplying his special wants. For him Mr. Coper has filled his stables with carriage-horses, hacks, hunters, cobs, ponies, all of unblemished reputation, and all warranted sound. For him Messrs. Butter and Co. have just imported a herd of down-calving Brittany cows, "excellent milkers, and well suited for amateur farmers." For him-but why go through the catalogue?—if Paterfamilias wishes to stock his farm and furnish his house and stables, and to be comfortable in his new abode, he has only got to put his hands into his breeches-pocket and to buy and be happy. How delightful it all looks upon paper, to be sure!

But as Paterfamilias will probably have to buy his experience pretty dear; as possibly the horse which Mr. Coper sells him may turn out lame or broken-winded, or may be a vicious brute with a propensity for kicking the carriage to pieces as soon as he gets between the shafts; as it may happen that his cow proves an inveterate old maid, and refuses to supply the family with milk,-as these or many other untoward events may happen, it may be of interest to him to study the map of the country which he is going to travel with one who knows the road well, and who, as an amateur farmer in a small way, has suffered all these mischances and many more, and yet who is satisfied that farming on a small scale pays well, and is profitable in more directions than one.

We are told that "some men are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." However this may be with greatness, of which I do not pretend to know anything, I am sure it holds good with farming. I was not born to it, but I had it thrust upon me, or rather I gradually became entangled in its fascinating meshes. When I came to settle in B. (we will call my little farm B., if you please), some two or three years back, I knew nothing whatever about the Economics of Country Life. I had never studied them, and I did not care about them. I hated the smell of a turnip-field, and scarcely knew barley from oats. The consequence was that the "swains" and "nymphs" of the neighbourhood pillaged me most unmercifully. I had to pay a penny a piece for eggs all the year round, and fourpence a quart for milk; in fact, London prices in a little country village a hundred miles away from