are bound to come back in a certain number of years. There is no question of injustice to the lender or buyer in such a case. The buyer or lender would get back the sum advanced, by the fruit of the land during the years of occupancy.

Such was the law in Israel. It prevented many evils well known to Gentile life. It stood in the way of the creation of large estates. It kept the land in its original distribution among the mass of the people. It preserved social equilibrium by nipping in the bud those fearful inequalities that are the bane of modern life. A modern mortgage lasts for ever, and adds unpaid interest to principal in an ever-increasing burden which at last sinks the property into perdition.

This is a great difference. All Israelitish mortgages were killed by time, and left property unencumbered, at last to come back into the hands of its original possessors. The one is full of blessedness, the other is full of woe. The one is the device of beneficent wisdom, the other the outcome of human avarice. The one secures the general diffusion of the goodness of God, the other allows of astute men fleecing their neighbours under the guise of legitimate legal formalities, and enables them to scramble to eminence over the prostrate bodies of the helpless.

To the general body of people in our day the subject may not appear to have any interesting or obvious bearing on human welfare. They know nothing of the possession of property beyond the tables and chairs which they use in the consumption of hard-earned daily meals, and the subject of mortgages and land laws is to them a far-off and repulsive legal affair. But the subject comes very near for all that. One of the cures for the world's present social derangement lies in the application of a wise land law; and no land law now in force is wise. The only wise land law is the law that God gave to Israel.

The proposed "nationalization" of the land might be an improvement upon the present utterly bad system; but it would not come near the Mosaic land-law which, while conserving the economic interests of the community, fostered family life in the strongest and most ennobling form.

"Nationalization" would leave land open to traffic and exploitation as now-in a different way, but with the same

unhappy results. "Familization is the true system, with a periodic year of release and general free restitution.

This system is unattainable except at the point of the sword. Divine coercion alone can bring it. It is interesting, meanwhile, to be able to realize the excellence of the system as a feature of the divine law once in vogue on the earth, in view of the express Bible prophecy that it will be re-established for all the earth when Christ reigns. It was established by the sword in that case, and it will be established by the sword again.

Such a land law firmly administered by the right sort of rulers would diffuse the wealth of the world among all classes. Still, poverty would creep in here and there, through special incapacities. For this also, the Mosaic land law provided. Every seventh year, the land was to be allowed to lie fallow. Agricultural science has discovered the virtue of giving the land an occasional rest to prevent the exhaustion of its fertility this may have been included in the objects aimed at in the Mosaic law. But the specified object opens out quite another line of consideration: "that the poor of thy people may eat, and what they leave, the beasts of the field shall eat" (Ex. xxiii. 11). The land, left to "rest and lie still" during the seventh year, would bring forth "that which groweth of its own accord" (Lev. xxv. 5). This was to be at the service of all comers, with one condition only-that they were poor. That year, there would be no trespass laws. There would be common thoroughfare over all lands, with a free welcome to whatever might be found useful.

The priestly tribe of Levites were not to have any inheritance in the land. They were to find their maintenance in another way. They were to be supported by a fixed contribution of a tenth from the produce of all the land. Nevertheless, they were to have cities of their own, though no fields or estates in the country (Joshua xxi. 1-3). "All the cities of the Levites within the possession of the children of Israel were forty and eight cities with their suburbs” (verse 41). These cities were scattered throughout the territories of all the other tribes. The enumeration of their several localities is minutely set forth in Joshua xxi.

The business of the Levites rendered this distribution necessary. Their business was to keep God before the mind of the people and to instruct them in the law: "The priest's lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts : (Mal. ii. 7). They were intended to be a spiritualising element in the population. The tribe of Levi was separated for this very purpose (Num. viii. 14: xvi. 9). How excellent a feature in national life was this—the wide scattering through all the land, of these Levitical cities as radiating centres of light and wisdom-protecting the surrounding population from the mentally benumbing effects of a merely agricultural life while not interfering with the invigorating and broadening tendency of an out-of-door and opulent occupation.

The system has been imitated and reproduced somewhat in the parochial system of Christendom: but with the lamentable result of a mere travesty. To an extent, no doubt, it has had an ameliorating effect on the rude populations of Europe. But there is a great difference between the divinely-appointed Levitical system working under suitable conditions in a country divinely arranged in all its details, and the artificial arrangements of a merely human ecclesiasticism, established with human ends in countries where the population has no divine relation.

No better social arrangement could have been contrived than an agricultural community territorially impregnated with the elements of a divine civilisation. That it was a failure we know: but this was not the fault of the law, but of the people, and principally of the teachers: "Ye (priests) are departed out of the way: ye have caused many to stumble at the law ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the Lord of Hosts." It was against them that the denunciations of Jesus were principally directed under the name current for them in his day, Scribes and Pharisees. The reproduction of the system under Christ will be attended with very different results: "I will settle you after your old estates, and do better for you than at your beginnings." "I will give you pastors after mine own heart that will feed you with knowledge and understanding." "The people also shall be all righteous: they shall inherit the land for ever."

When we extend our view beyond the settlement of the people in families on the land, on the basis of inalienable inheritance (subject to unconditional and compulsory release every fifty years), to the further laws given to bring individual life under reverence, and purity and gratitude, and to rouse up public life into recurring seasons of joyous social activity, we see features of public law that have not ceased to be adapted to the social, religious, and political needs of man. They are features of public life that would never be seen in a Socialist republic of the merely human type. They will be established by the strong arm of man's truly social Friend when He returns to finish the work of which He laid the foundation 1,800 years ago. So, at all events, believes

Your not mad, though apparently fanciful, friend,

JOHN SMITH.

What is Coming.

I

My Dear Mr. Blatchford,

COME now to your last letter. I am strongly exercised by the powerful appeal it contains. I thrill responsively to the idea of bringing human life into harmony with "the smiling fields and laughing water under the awful and unsullied sky."

It is quite superfluous, if you knew, for you to ask me, if all the misery of the world is nothing to me. I tell you it is more than you may believe. I am terribly affected by it; the thought of it often makes me feel as if I could not eat my own dinner.

But when you ask me to "strike a blow to save the fallen and to help the weak," the idea seems very foolish when I try to carry it out. What blow can I strike that will be good for anything? If I speak to the poor inhabiters of the slums they laugh at me, or perhaps curse me. If I breathe a doubtful word to the respectable people I meet on the street, they ask me what I mean, and talk of handing me over to the police. If I summon up courage and try a speech at the street corner about the shameful state of the poor and the downtrodden, I get an audience of impertinent boys, who make fun of me.

You say, "Join the Socialists, agitate against idle peers and fraudulent capitalists; vote for labour candidates, and try to change the present system." Mr. Blatchford, I would even do this if I thought it would save the people. But I believe