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which prevail respecting the efficacy of emigration could make persons deny in the case of an extensive territory, or of the whole earth, what they could not fail to acknowledge in the case of a single farm, which may be said fairly to represent it." Before admitting the conclusion to be drawn from this passage, I may say that Malthus himself has been guilty of confusion and indistinctness arising from the largeness of the subject. The practice of theorising in the abstract led him to claim too much for his law; it led him to confound the possible and probable with the actual. Looking forward to the time when, as he supposed, every inch of ground would have attained its maximum of fertility, he concluded that mankind, increasing in geometric ratio, would be finally starved. That, as it seems to me, is all that his system has for logical result. But, turning with this abstraction into the world of to-day, he declares that at present we Owe our social misery to the fact that we are actually advancing, and in advance, beyond means of subsistence. This is wholly disproved by any examination of the real state of things as exhibited in statistics.

But a second error incidental to his system, and really not essential to it, Malthus gave prominent place to as a truth. He maintained that population increases so fast that there is a growing superabundance of labour, more men existing than their neighbours can provide work for. This can never be the case until there be no corn to give them; for as long as men have food to spare for exchange, they will have wants they will be anxious to satisfy by bartering it for their fulfilment. To look forward to any dearth of labour, except as the direct consequence of dearth of food, was clearly an error.

These two fallacies the whole of this paper has been designed to expose. What remains for the present unrefuted is the affirmation that population increases, while the size of the globe does not increase, so that if things go on as at present the earth will be ultimately overcrowded. Notice that this statement does not take the form of a final truth. The Malthusian is not entitled to say, "As certainly as there is a sun in the heavens the earth will one day be overpeopled." All he is entitled to say is, that if things go on as at present this will be so. Nor can

we deny it. But this is the residuum of truth we find in the theory after applying proper tests, and it is not so very disheartening after all. Things will not go on as at present. Things will not go on to-morrow as they have gone on to-day. A year's improvements now are greater than those of fifty years in an age less civilised. There is every reason to believe that in agriculture, as well as in everything else, we shall ten years hence be as much better than now, as now we are than our forefathers were half a century ago. Accordingly, while we must denounce on all hands the Malthusian doctrine, if it be urged as a remedy for existing evils, we may leave it for posterity to refute, if it merely point to an abstract probability in future ages. As a practical scheme, I have no doubt it will by future generations be looked upon as a historical curiosity, to be compared with such as Plato's plan for the peopling of the state.

We need not fear. Science will do her duty-do it the better that she has the more dependent on her. And as for Nature, from whom we never yet received a lie, let us give her our pledge of faith in the words of Cicero, "Omnia vero quæ secundum naturam fiunt sunt habenda in bonis."

CHAPTER I.

A FAMILY PARTY.

BY AN OLD CONTRIBUTOR.

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Its occupant was a tolerably good-looking young man, medium height and gentlemanly appearance, well dressed and wearing an air of prosperity. But just now he looked eminently dissatisfied with circumstances. He moved from one window to the other; then took out his watch; then repeated his inspection of the street.

"This hateful London, full of fog, it's enough to make a man expect to be refused; and that child, in the sunny country, plays with my hopes like this-will not even write to end my suspense. It is too late now for the postman, he must have passed, and I shall be confoundedly late at the office."

He turned from another long look up the street, and slowly took his hat and prepared to go out. But he put it down again for a moment, as if the effort was too great.

"Has she been playing with me?" he said to himself, and his

face altered and grew dark at the thought. "Am I being punished as I deserved for supposing that such a man as her father could rear an innocent girl? Had she been the tender, sweet woman she seemed, she would have felt for the man who had laid his soul open to her in that letter; she could not have kept me two whole days in suspense. I can have no letter now until to-morrow. It is the cruelty of a heartless woman to keep me like this-the cruelty of a panther rather than a woman. have admired her father's clever description of the panther-woman -the being who charms only to destroy-and then have blindly fallen a victim. She let me learn to love her, now she is silent. I am well punished."

I

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He took up his hat gloomily. He must go and face the world of the city, which, busied with its eternal money-making, takes no count of a man's love affairs. had an expression on his face which must leave it before he went into the street. He paused a second before a mirror, making a rather ghastly effort at re-modelling his expression. Then he went boldly out.

"I shall come in to lunch," he said to his landlady, as he met her on the stairs. "The country post might be late!" he said to himself, like a faint-hearted fool. For, be a man as brave as concentrated John Bullism can make him at other times, he is timid and hesi

tating when thoroughly in love. At all events, Charlie Newman found it very difficult to turn round and believe Lil, the girl he loved, the bright, bewitching child of a man of genius, to be nothing but a heartless coquette, the original of the woman of the world whom her father had painted to that world's admiration.

And so he went to his business saying to himself, with the strange freshness of feeling with which men produce hackneyed sentiments when they are called forth by their own lives, "If that child is a panther, I will never believe in a woman again."

He had a long morning before he could go back to lunch; he must distract his mind from the great question of the faithfulness of woman and fix it upon questions of finance. The money

market is as unstable as a woman's affections; and the two great subjects of finance and the feminine nature are too large to occupy a male mind at one and the same time. So even though he was on the agony point-though he had proposed and been neither accepted or refused-Charlie had to follow the example of other business men, and put his soul and his heart out of court for a certain number of hours.

It was more difficult than usual, as indeed might be expected. It was impossible to shut out from his mind the thought of Lil Warrington and his sickening anxiety. Over and over again he reviewed his position, and recalled every word and look of hers during a scene which had occurred between them but a couple of days before.

It was on the lawn of a country house, from which he had just returned. Lil Warrington had been staying there too. She was only .eighteen, slender, quiet, independent. The ladies liked her, but

thought her education had been sadly neglected, and that it was absurd for such a child to have a decided taste in dress-it made her peculiar. The gentlemen said she was a little bluestocking, but a capital girl all the same. Charlie Newman thought her unlike anyone else he knew; and before he had formed any further opinion about her found himself proposing marriage on the lawn.

And Lil's answer had been this --he knew every word of it, and the look in her brown eyes as she said it:

"But I don't think you and papa would ever get on; and I can't possibly marry anybody that didn't get on with papa."

Charlie was a little taken aback at first, and stood pulling his moustache; but roused by a gleam of fun in Lil's eyes, he had answered her thus:

"And must I get on with grandmamma, too?"

"It doesn't so much matter," said Lil; "for I can't get on with her myself."

"Then it's only papa. Well, let me ask him."

"Oh, he will let me marry anybody that I want to. But I couldn't marry anybody he didn't like; and I am not sure he likes you." She had said this seriously, reflectively, looking up at Charlie. She caught a slight amused smile under his moustaches. She was provoked.

"He says you are a prig," she went on. ("Could she be a panther?" thought Charlie, remembering this. "If so she had not acquired the dangerous smoothness which would have made her polite to her lover even when she was crushing him.")

"He says you are a prig; and I am not quite sure yet whether he is right or not."

"He calls me a prig?" repeated Charlie, coolly. Well, such a

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bold Bohemian as Brough Warrington can perhaps afford to throw stones at those who do not care to sin against the respectabilities of life quite to the extent he does."

(Yes, it was rude; and there had been a sneer in his voice. But he belonged to a respectable world in which Brough Warrington, if admired, was disapproved. He ought not to have sneered; but Lil had provoked him.)

She raised her eves from the

flowers in her hand, where they had found a refuge from meeting Charlie's gaze, and looked him in the face. He was in earnest-yes -the sneer was not assumed, as for a second she had hoped; he was not just teasing her.

She turned, and without speaking walked in her most dignified manner to the house. And slender Lil, who was called by her father's friends the "little Queen of Bohemia," could be absolutely dignified when she liked.

Charlie followed her slowly. He thought she would turn. She did not. Indeed, she could not, for the tears had brimmed over her eyes and were treacherously wetting her cheeks.

She already began to realise the trial of this first difficult experience of hers. She was not quite sure whether she was in love with Mr. Newman; yet she could not find words to refuse him. And he was so earnestly and thoroughly in love with her that she momently liked him more and more. Butwould it ever be possible for such dissimilar natures as Brough Warrington, the jovial literary lion, and Charles Newman, a scholarly but, as Brough had said of him, rather priggish young gentleman of the modern school, to hit it off together.

She was close to the steps of the house. She wiped up her tears

adroitly, for she heard voicesthere were people standing there. Luckily for her it was twilight.

"Miss Warrington-you won't go without a word!"

The voice behind her was so intensely earnest that it brought tears to the foolish child's eyes again. She could not trust herself to speak-she ran quickly past the group on the steps and went to her room, where she locked herself in until the dinner bell rang.

Charlie must go back to London the next day. He had to go early, to reach his office, as his holidaymaking was at an end. He had gone when she came down to breakfast; but he left her a letter which, though it had filled but a page of note paper, had taken him half the night to write.

He was still waiting for the

answer.

Lil had been quite scared at the amount of passion he had concentrated on the page in question. She sought out her hostess and said she must go home; the lady, looking in the child's clear face, half guessed the cause, and let her go quietly. Pale, and almost frightened, she packed up her things ready to be driven to the station. She was very glad to go. She wanted to talk to Brough. Alone with him at home, perhaps she would know better what to do. For, not only was she troubled by the fact that she did not think her father liked Charlie, but she did not understand her own feelings. A girl of that age, who has not been precociously developed in a hotbed of flirtation, finds it difficult to believe herself in love. There is something so tender, uncertain, intangible, in the dawning of love in an untried innocent heart. "I don't believe I'm in love a bit," said Lil to herself; "and yet oh, dear, I can't refuse him."

This was a perplexing position for a straightforward young lady like Lil. She did not enjoy cross currents of feeling; and now she was in a more chaotic state than she had ever been in her life. What should she do?

"I'll talk to papa," she said. "I shall get home to dinner. Charlie must wait a post. Yes, surely papa will be able to help me."

When Lil was travelling, thinking, and perplexing herself, and sometimes crying a little in the corner of her carriage, Brough was walking about his river-encircled garden, looking fierce and disconsolate. He had sat down that morning to engage upon the crisis of a new book, when he was disturbed by a knock at the door. "What's the matter?" asked he, with the frown of arrested thought on his forehead. An idea had just come to him, and he tried to hold fast by its skirts, and prevent its escape, while he dealt with the unwelcome interruption.

"If you please, sir," said the stout little housekeeper, who did her best to hold the reins of the somewhat reckless animals that pulled the Warrington turn-out,

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has been a shock to me, and scattered every idea I had. And if Mrs. Warrington insists upon coming, prepare the most magnificent room we possess or, if you think it would please her, you might make up several beds for her. Send me the wine directly, there's a good soul; I feel quite ill!"

Mrs. March retired to carry out her orders. "The old lady is coming to-day, as far as I can make out," said she to the manservant, when she was sending him in with the wine; "but the master doesn't like it at all, with Miss Lil away. I hope she'll come home before the week's out, for he'll be in a terrible temper if he has the old lady to himself too long!"

After making one draught of a pint of sparkling wine, Brough applied himself to his work again, and did not move from his table until the afternoon. But then he went out in the garden for a stretch; and, while walking about, he suddenly remembered afresh that his respected mother was coming that very afternoon to stay with him. It was bad enough when she monopolised Lil-but with no one to interpose between these radically opposite disposi tions, what a bore it would be! He had no idea that at that very moment Lil was preparing to start home, and thus, unintentionally (for she had not heard of Gran's projected visit) was coming to his rescue. And so he walked round and round the lawn, his two greyhounds following him, trying to bring himself to a properly filial

frame of mind.

It is odd how unsuccessful people generally are when they try to produce a mental state. The more Brough endeavoured to feel as he ought in the expectation of his mother's advent, the more rebellious he became, until, when at

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