I WANT to say a word upon one of the urgent topics of the hour; a word which could be better said by another, - for I have had all too little training in the art of expression, but to the saying of which my experience peculiarly urges me. I was driven into the machineshop when thirteen years old, and have been held there until now I have passed full a quarter of a century as a worker for daily wages. I have had my share of the vicissitudes of the times. I do not stand among the least skillful or trustworthy of mechanics, and yet for years now I have not found the opportunity to earn at my trade the means of a decent and comfortable subsistence, and my heart has ached in view of the privation and suffering which industrious and worthy men, and those dear as life to them, have had to endure under the stern grip of circumstance.

The ages have scarcely produced a more helpless and pitiable object than a man out of work in the midst of our roaring century. To such a one, or to one over whom such a fate seems impending, over-production is apparently a self-evident, as it certainly is a terrible inference. No one who would understand the present state of affairs, and especially no one who is in any measure a shaper of other men's thoughts, can safely ignore the thorough fright and desperation of the workingman in the presence of this gigantic bugbear. To comprehend how completely the fear of over-production has taken possession of the minds of workingmen, we may note how perfect a key it is to the interpretation of every distinctive workingman's "movement." To check the advance of this towering terror is the motive of their every proposition. The workingman depends upon the labor of his hands to obtain for him every good, but over-production is suggesting to him that his opportunities are hopelessly circumscribed. The hope of advancement,

which was once with him a strong incentive, is gone; he cannot even hope long to hold his own. Circumstances have narrowed about him, until, so to speak, he can no longer use his fins, and, like a fish in a water-pipe, he is borne helplessly down by the current.

Many, blindly following the lead of this idea, attain to positions as absurd as they are pitiable. It has been argued to me personally, and in all sincerity, that even those who live upon the vices of the people, in so far as they are therefore not competitors for the work which is already insufficient for the workers, are a help and a blessing.

Holding such a conviction very distinctly, the workingman is impelled by the instinct of self-preservation to oppose the tendency of the times with all his strength and persistence. The tradesunion attempts to limit the number of apprentices in any given trade, and thereby hopes to keep down the number of competing workmen. It attempts in the shops to limit the amount that a man may do for a day's work. It would reduce the hours of daily labor. So the workingman's party opposes all productive convict labor, because it competes with paid labor. The national labor party lately proposed that government should print a vast amount of greenbacks, and pay them out for constructing various public works, as a way of "making work" for workingmen.

So far as I know, propositions of this character constitute the whole of the workingman's wisdom upon the subject. But if the danger be really so great as he honestly believes it, is it not evident that these are all temporizing and contemptible expedients against it? Even the indefinite extension of our foreign trade, of which we have now some glimmering hopes, carries with it a promise of lasting help scarcely less illusory. We must eventually diffuse our methods where we diffuse our products, and then

we shall be as bad off as ever, so far as that assistance is concerned. We have been trying quack specifics for a cure which can be brought about only by a radical change of life.

If over-production be the terrible fact, machinery is as clearly the cause of it. But machinery is human success. It is the accomplishment, still but partial, of the life-long purpose of the race. It wrests from nature as much as possible of material good at as little cost as possible of human exertion. To check its action is simply not to use what we have toiled long to attain. It is a ripened fruit of the tree of knowledge, whose roots are in primeval soil, and it were indeed unwise to cast it from us, or to let it rot on our hands, instead of filling ourselves with its lusciousness.

The joy of the worker, too, is not a thing to be lightly taken from him. What is life worth to me if I must hereafter aim to do as little as possible of whatever I undertake? What of health

or vigor may I know if I must always crawl at a snail's pace? I count it not less than a misfortune to a man that he may not swing to the full reach and strength of it the faculty which for the time he is using. Over-production is a false landmark. The road which, in sight of it, we are laying out for ourselves is a most unsatisfactory one, and the view ahead, if we look straight and far, is gloomier still. The way is so bad that there must be a better.

Double-entry is of great service as a preventive of errors in accounts, and is a necessity in recording the transactions of any extensive business. Why will not men more generally keep their ideas by double-entry? Over-production affords a striking illustration of its applicability. While over-production apparently expresses what is meant with satisfactory precision, it is merely a relative term, and it at best expresses but a single relation of an extensive fact. There is a correlative term equally applicable to precisely the same facts, but referring to other relations and suggest ing a very different view of the sequences of events; and if we can learn to employ

the two terms instead of the one, they will together open to our view a wider field in which to choose the path of our progress.

We hear much on every hand concerning over-production, but we hear little anywhere of under-consumption. What workingman, or, indeed, who of any class, habitually remembers the reciprocal relation which he holds? When we make the debit entry, who of us are equally careful to make the corresponding credit entry? Let the workingman who is so troubled about over-production consider his relations as a consumer also, and he may see that he is a shaper of circumstance even as others are, and that he is not so helpless and abject as he has been in the habit of thinking himself. I gather from the self-styled "workingmen's" papers that there is but one perfect thing in this world: the blamelessness and innocence of the working classes is the only thing without a flaw. "The king can do no wrong' was the doctrine of the olden time; but the doctrine of to-day, taught him at least by implication and by suggestive silence, is that the workingman can do no wrong. Yet in the face of it I venture to probe my fellows with a searching practical question. Let every one who complains that sufficient remunerative employment is not provided for him ask himself whether he does, or whether in better times he did, so use his own earnings as best to provide work for others. I do not know why that is not a perfectly fair and proper question, although I doubt not I actually surprise some workingmen by suggesting it. If there be any obligation of support, it is certainly a mutual one, and that is how I would have it. The workingman has the power, in natural and peaceful ways, of directing the relative tendencies of supply and demand, and by a wise and wide use of that power of enhancing the value of his services. The value of a man's labor, or its ability to purchase the results of another man's labor, is determined by two distinct considerations. The practical value of a man's wages varies: first, with the ratio which his

labor bears to the total labor of the people; and, secondly, with the ratio which the product of his labor bears to the total consumption. Let the consumption of the world be fixed; then, if we increase the product of the worker, as machinery has done, the relative value of the individual product is lessened. If the product of the world be fixed and the consumption of the world increased, the relative value of the product, and so of the ability to produce, is increased. The value of a man's labor varies directly with the consumption, and inversely with the production, of the world.

If, then, we can but maintain the due ratio of consumption to production, the same number of people in the world may have and enjoy much as well as they may enjoy little; and in the use of the much instead of the little, in the fuller and larger life of all the people, is the true intent and the practical realization of progress. The workingman looks every way but upward; and yet upward is the way of safety, and the one way toward which circumstances urgently beckon him. Our wisdom has been at fault in that we have dealt with but one of the two elements of labor value. While we have been trying, by puny and contemptible methods, to check the current of production, we have paid little attention to consumption, allowing it to stand unchanged, or witnessing with unconcern instances of actual retrogression. The promise of succor for the working man appears to me to lie in his working at the other end of the line. The promotion of a wider and healthier consumption, and of the fuller life which it implies, and not a compulsory reduction of production, is the thing to be attempted. The workingman holds the consumption end of the chain of life with a far more commanding grasp than he does the production end of it. A man must take what work he can get, and follow it steadily; his production is closely limited by circumstances, and he can do little either to increase or diminish it. But the expenditure of every cent of his wages involves some choice as to the channel in which it shall be spent, and

every change of expenditure makes a difference as to the amount of consumption involved in or promoted by it.

Of

The necessity of a broader popular education may be enforced by higher considerations than those which we have got the habit of urging for it. Perhaps what we esteem our weightiest reason for desiring a better education for the masses is in the increased security which it promises the state, by securing to her in each educated man a more law-abiding citizen. But education is growth: the educated man is a man of larger appetite; he draws more vigorously of all the good things of life; he reaches out after and enjoys more of the appliances of culture; he uses more of the world's products; he is a greater consumer. We find in workingmen as markedly as in any class this difference, due to the various degrees of their development. men working side by side in the shop and earning equal wages, there is a vast discrepancy in the scope of their expenditure, and in the good which it is made to yield them. Can we for a moment think of them each as giving equal stimulus to the productive forces of the country? The struggle for respectability; the keeping up of appearances, as the stereotyped phrase is, — the keeping up of facts, rather, - against formidable obstacles; the heroic upholding of a home where love and truth and purity shall dwell secure, where taste and knowledge shall increase, is worthy of all honor. They of the humbler classes who would maintain and indeed advance the standard of our home life against all opposing forces are in truth, though they perhaps know it not, the patriots of today; and in them, if anywhere, is the hope and promise of our restoration.

It will be well for the world to remember that the workingman is to be led, even as other men are. There is a trace of human nature remaining in him, and there is a directing power in the example and sympathy of other men by which, in part consciously, and in part unconsciously, his course is modified. The broad plan of a man's life and the elaboration of its details are determined by

what he thinks of himself, what others think of him, and, as important as either, what he thinks that they think of him; and he who is wise and seeking the good of all will aim to treat all with just consideration. It is not a little thing for one man to lose his influence among his fellows; but when a class despises and throws away, or when it transforms and reverses, its influence upon another class, the evil is a serious one. The selfrespect of the workingman, bracing him to rectitude and widening the range of his necessities, is an important industrial factor; and they who, from whatever motive, or lack of motive, do aught to diminish it, or to weaken his honest pride, not only wrong him, but strike at the national life a blow whose force

recoils upon themselves. The workingman needs good advice, of course; but he needs sympathy and appreciation more. Through the lack of these, he is driven away from some of the sources of sound information and elevating influence by which the course of this age is directed. The respectable press has less than its due weight with him. Of course he can be only a loser by it. The papers published "in the interest of labor are not in the interest of intelligent thought or of fair discussion. I really do not know how to bring my convictions fairly and directly to his notice. I can only start my word as high as possible, hoping that the farther it is to sift down through the masses, the wider it may spread in its descent.

Frank Richards.

THE greatest novel of the year is none the less interesting and impressive because the incessantly laborious process whereby the author draws near to his severe ideal is every where apparent to the thoughtful reader. Nobody who has read Hardy's Return of the Native1 can doubt that this is the book meant, and most of those who admire his previous books will, we think, share our opinion that the latest, in its own singular and sombre fashion, is nearer perfect than any other of them. Like Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd, it is a tale confined to the obscurest level of society. But it is perfectly sustained in the low key where it is pitched, which the Madding Crowd is not: along the edges of the narrow life portrayed there are frequent glimpses of infinite horizons; the cumulative tragedy into whose forecast shadow we so strongly and naturally shrink from entering is all simple, circumstantial, inevit

1 The Return of the Native. By THOMAS HARDY. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1878.

able, never once, not even on the black night of the suicide, breaking down into melodrama; and at the last we are led into the twilight of better days, with a touch gentle as that of time itself, so that we look back as over an experience, and recognize with admiration the exquisite fitness of the wistful motto from Keats which Mr. Hardy has chosen for his title-page:

"To sorrow I bade good-morrow,

And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly, she loves me dearly,
She is so constant to me and so kind!

I thought to deceive her, and so leave her,
But ah, she is so constant and so kind!"

It has become rather a commonplace to call Mr. Hardy Shakespearean, and we once heard a witty commentator suggest the reason, because his characters talk like nobody either in life or in books except the clowns in Shakespeare. To us he seems not so much to have borrowed as to have evolved out of one of his own quaint theories that racy and antiquated mode of speech which is so amusing in the mouths of his country-folk; but

he has this other quality in common with Shakespeare and all the veritable immortals, that his work leaves one in an exalted frame of mind, disposed either to dreamy reflection or to vague and fervid eulogy. Such mental exercises, however, being neither here nor there in the way of critical appreciation, let us try soberly to learn something of the manner in which he produces his remarkable effects.

We note first his peculiar but masterly treatment of scenery. Most novelists, since Scott first invited his readers out-of-doors, have more or less affected landscape; but they have either sketched it in around their characters, or set it up as a reflector of their emotions, or themselves sought it as a refuge in the intervals when the languid creatures of their brains positively declined to act. Hardy only, and conspicuously in his last book, elaborates his landscape first, in its utmost breadth, down to its minutest features, and then sets his people in it in their true physical proportions, sparse, feeble, and insignificant, as human beings are, by comparison with mountain and moorland, sea and sky. It is a method undreamed of in what are called pagan times, but of which the effect is pagan and pantheistic to the last degree. The delineation of Egdon Heath, with which the Native opens, is so solemn and scrupulous that it seems levity to call it picturesque. It is simply one of the most tremendous pieces of verbal realization in the language. It is too long to quote entire, and extracts cannot illustrate the grand and massive plainness of Mr. Hardy's descriptive style.

There follow some very subtle reflections about the way in which the world seems gradually to be outgrowing its taste for mere external beauty, as children outgrow a taste for sweet things. It is one of the author's favorite fancies. We are ceasing, he says, to require beauty and symmetry in landscape. We have already ceased to require it in the persons of men. We may some day cease to require it in the persons of women. Is this the self-same dreary consummation toward which the unhappy Mr.

Swinburne is looking in those strange lines of his concerning

"The obscure Venus of the hollow hill,

The thing transformed which was the Cy therean"?

But to return to Egdon. "The most thorough-going ascetic could feel that he had a right to wander there. He was keeping within the line of legitimate indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these. Colors and beauties so far subdued were at least the birthright of all. Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of gayety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists."

"Then Egdon was aroused to reciprocity. The storm was its lover; the wind was its friend. Then it became the lair of strange phantoms; it was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by scenes like these."

-- a

"It was at present [late on a November afternoon] an environment perfectly accordant with man's nature, scene neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly, neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame, but, like man, slighted, enduring, and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have lived long apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face suggesting tragical possibilities."

Anywhere else we might be tempted to condemn as clap-trap a device like that of the map or plan of the heath, with its natural features and scattered dwellings, prefixed as a frontispiece to the volume; but at Mr. Hardy's hands we accept it respectfully, and find it a great practical help to the thorough understanding of a mysterious and momentous thing. Once fairly apprehended, this mighty vision of waste country,