section-lines, often going up and down hill, over bog or stream, and almost always compelling the traveller to go a much greater distance than the form of the surface rendered necessary.

Then again, owing to the necessity for rapidly and securely fencing in these quarter-sections, and to the fact that the greater part of the States first settled were largely forest-clad, it became the custom to build rough, strong fences of splittrees, which utilized the timber as it was cut and involved no expenditure of cash by the settler. Again, to avoid the labour of putting posts in the ground the fence was at first usually built of rails or logs laid zigzag on each other to the height required, so as to be self-supporting, the upper pairs only being fastened together by a spike through them, the waste of material in such a fence being compensated by the reduction of the labour, since the timber itself was often looked upon as a nuisance to be got rid of before cultivation was possible. And yet again, this fact of timber being in the way of cultivation and of no use till cut down, led to the very general clearing away of all the trees from about the house, so that it is a comparatively rare thing, except in the eastern towns and villages, to find any old trees that have been left standing for shade or for beauty.

For these and for similar causes acting through the greater part of North America, there results a monotonous and unnatural ruggedness, a want of harmony between man and nature, the absence of all those softening effects of human labour and human occupation carried on for generation after generation in the same simple way, and in its slow and gradual utilization of natural forces allowing the renovating agency of vegetable and animal life to conceal all harshness of colour or form, and clothe the whole landscape in a garment of perennial beauty.

Over the larger part of America everything is raw and bare and ugly, with the same kind of ugliness with which we also are defacing our land and destroying its rural beauty. The ugliness of new rows of cottages built to let to the poor, the ugliness of the mean streets of our towns, the ugliness of

VOL. II.

our "black countries" and our polluted streams. Both countries are creating ugliness, both are destroying beauty; but in America it is done on a larger scale and with a more hideous monotony. The more refined among the Americans see this themselves as clearly as we see it. One of them has said, "A whole huge continent has been so touched by human hands that, over a large part of its surface it has been reduced to a state of unkempt, sordid ugliness; and it can be brought back into a state of beauty only by further touches of the same hands more intelligently applied."1

Turning now from the land to the people, what can we say of our American cousins as a race and as a nation? The great thing to keep in mind is, that they are, largely and primarily, of the same blood and of the same nature as ourselves, with characters and habits formed in part by the evil traditions inherited from us, in part by the influence of the new environment to which they have been exposed. Just as we owe our good and bad qualities to the intermixture and struggle of somewhat dissimilar peoples, so do they. Briton and Roman, Saxon and Dane, Norsemen and Norman-French, Scotch and Irish Celts-all have intermingled in various proportions, and helped to create that energetic amalgam known the world over as Englishmen. So North America has been largely settled by the English, partly by Dutch, French, and Spanish, whose territories were soon absorbed by conquest or purchase; while, during the last century, a continuous stream of immigrants-Germans, Irish, Highland and Lowland Scotch, Scandinavians, Italians, Russians-has flowed in, and is slowly but surely becoming amalgamated into one great Anglo-American people.

Most of the evil influences under which the United States have grown to their present condition of leaders in civilization, and a great power among the nations of the world, they received from us. We gave them the example of religious intolerance and priestly rule, which they have now happily thrown off more completely than we have done. We gave

The Century, June, 1887.

them slavery, both white and black-a curse from the effects of which they still suffer, and out of which a wholly satisfactory escape seems as remote as ever. But even more insidious and more widespread in its evil results than both of these, we gave them our bad and iniquitous feudal land system; first by enormous grants from the Crown to individuals or to companies, but also-what has produced even worse effectsthe ingrained belief that land-the first essential of life, the source of all things necessary or useful to mankind, by labour upon which all wealth arises-may yet, justly and equitably, be owned by individuals, be monopolized by capitalists or by companies, leaving the great bulk of the people as absolutely dependent on these monopolists for permission to work and to live as ever were the negro slaves of the south before emancipation.

The result of acting upon this false conception is, that the Government has already parted with the whole of the accessible and cultivable land, and though large areas still remain for any citizen who will settle upon it by the mere payment of very moderate fees, this privilege is absolutely worthless to those who most want it-the very poor. And throughout the western half of the Union one sees everywhere the strange anomaly of building lots in small remote towns, surrounded by thousands of uncultivated acres (and perhaps ten years before sold for eight or ten shillings an acre), now selling at the rate of from £1000 to £20,000 an acre! It is not an uncommon thing for town lots in new places to double their value in a month, while a fourfold increase in a year is quite common. Hence land speculation has become a vast organized business over all the Western States, and is considered to be a proper and natural mode of getting rich. It is what the Stock Exchange is to the great cities. And this wealth, thus gained by individuals, initiates that process which culminates in railroad and mining kings, in oil and beef trusts, and in the thousand millionaires and multi-millionaires whose vast accumulated incomes are, every penny of them, paid by the toiling workers, including the five million of farmers whose lives of constant toil only result for the most part in a bare

livelihood, while the railroad magnates and corn speculators absorb the larger portion of the produce of their labour.

What a terrible object-lesson is this as to the fundamental wrong in modern societies which leads to such a result! Here is a country more than twenty-five times the area of the British Islands, with a vast extent of fertile soil, grand navigable waterways, enormous forests, a superabounding wealth of minerals-everything necessary for the support of a population twenty-five times that of ours-about fifteen hundred millions-which has yet, in little more than a century, destroyed nearly all its forests, is rapidly exhausting its marvellous stores of natural oil and gas, as well as those of the precious metals; and as the result of all this reckless exploiting of nature's accumulated treasures has brought about overcrowded cities reeking with disease and vice, and a population which, though only one-half greater than our own, exhibits all the pitiable phenomena of women and children working long hours in factories and workshops, garrets and cellars, for a wage which will not give them the essentials of mere healthy animal existence; while about the same proportion of its workers, as with us, endure lives of excessive labour for a bare livelihood, or constitute that crying disgrace of modern civilization-willing men seeking in vain for honest work, and forming a great army of the unemployed.

What a demonstration is this of the utter folly and stupidity of those blind leaders of the blind who impute all the evils of our social system, all our poverty and starvation, to over-population! Ireland, with half the population of fifty years ago, is still poor to the verge of famine, and is therefore still overpeopled. And for England and Scotland as well, the cry is still, “Emigrate! emigrate! We are overpeopled!" But what of America, with twenty-five times as much land as we have, with even greater natural resources, and with a population even more ingenious, more energetic, and more hard-working than ours? Are they over-populated with only twenty people to the square mile? There is only one rational solution of this terrible problem. The system that allows the land and the minerals, the means

of communication, and all other public services, to be monopolized for the aggrandisement of the few-for the creation of millionaires-necessarily leads to the poverty, the degradation, the misery of the many.

There never has been, in the whole history of the human race, a people with such grand opportunities for establishing a society and a nation in which the products of the general labour should be so distributed as to produce general wellbeing. It wanted but a recognition of the fundamental principle of "equality of opportunity," tacitly implied in the Declaration of Independence. It wanted but such social arrangements as would ensure to every child the best nurture, the best training of all its faculties, and the fullest opportunity for utilizing those faculties for its own happiness and for the common benefit. Not only equality before the law, but equality of opportunity, is the great fundamental principle of social justice. This is the teaching of Herbert Spencer, but he did not carry it out to its logical consequence-the inequity, and therefore the social immorality of wealthinheritance. To secure equality of opportunity there must be no inequality of initial wealth. To allow one child to be born a millionaire and another a pauper is a crime against humanity, and, for those who believe in a deity, a crime against God.1

It is universally admitted that very great individual wealth, whether inherited or acquired, is beneficial neither to the individual nor to society. In the former case it is injurious, and often morally ruinous to the possessor; in the latter it confers little or no happiness to the acquirer of it, and is a positive injury to his heirs and a danger to the State. Yet its fascinations are so great that, under conditions of society in which the yawning gulf of poverty is ever open beside us, the amassing of wealth at first seems a duty, then becomes a habit, and, ultimately, the gambler's excitement without which he cannot live. The struggle for wealth and power is always exciting, and to many is irresistible. But it is essentially a degrading struggle, because 1 I have discussed this subject in my "Studies," vol. ii. chap. xxviii.