famine and rebellion, and for seven millions sterling annually expended on the English poor. Doubtless, it is desirable to have a body of fifty thousand wealthy landed proprietors in the state, many of whom are accomplished gentlemen and fit to be hereditary legislators; but, unluckily, they cannot be had without bringing with them a million and a half of paupers every year, and reducing the rate of wages, on which half of the nation are entirely dependent, to the lowest point that will sustain life on the poorest and scantiest fare.

But it is feared that the motive for accumulation will not be strong enough, if it is not stimulated by a sight of the splendor and luxury in which the great landlords live, and the influence and consideration which they enjoy. To this Mr. Mill's answer seems sufficient, that "in America there are few or no great hereditary fortunes; yet industrial energy and the ardor of accumulation are not supposed to be particularly backward in that part of the world." Economists generally make a great mistake, when they put so much stress upon the necessity of keeping up the incentives for people to get rich. Human nature requires no urging in this respect. Wealth is coveted originally, no doubt, for some ulterior motive, for the enjoyments that it will bring; but it soon comes to be loved for its own sake, the passion and the habit of money-making leading to the sacrifice of every object for which riches at first seemed desirable. The certain and undisturbed possession of a fortune for one's own lifetime is motive enough for exertion; we do not believe that the springs of industry and economy would be sensibly relaxed, if a man's power over his wealth should cease entirely at his death, the state then appropriating it, and giving but a small portion to his children.

However this may be, Mr. McCulloch is wrong in supposing that the sight of great estates tied up perpetually in the same families is so effectual a stimulus to industry as if the same amount of wealth were more equally distributed, and passed frequently from hand to hand, the alternations of fortune being frequent, and the chance to every individual of being successful sooner or later being consequently increased. To induce men to buy tickets in a lottery, there must not only be great prizes in the wheel, but some chance, however small, of drawing one within a definite period. Every lawyer who begins practice may hope one day to beVOL. LXVII. NO. 141.

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come Lord Chancellor, for as that splendid office is not handed down by hereditary descent, some member of the bar must obtain it; and this hope, slight as it is, is one of the springs which keep up the activity and learning of the profession. But a country gentleman with a thousand a year sees no possibility of his becoming a Duke of Buccleuch with an income two hundred times as great; and therefore the country gentleman usually does nothing but hunt foxes and go to Newmarket. To take great estates out of the inarket, as is done in Scotland, tying them up for ever in the same families, making alienation, division, and we may add, improvement, - alike impossible, is in fact to lessen the number of the prizes of industry, and so far, while rendering one man improvident, wasteful, and idle, to lessen the hopes and deaden the exertions of all others. Go to the other end of society, and you find the same cause working out similar results. What hope has an Irish cottier, a Tipperary boy, exert himself as he may, of ever obtaining more generous fare than buttermilk and sodden potatoes? and who can wonder that, without such hope, he should become the reckless, lazy, and quarrelsome beggar that he is? What encouragement is it to him, that, from the door of his mud cabin, he can see the magnificent but deserted abode of his absentee landlord, who comes over once in a year or two to look after his Irish estates which yield him an income of £20,000 a year? It shows the almost indomitable energy of the English character, that the sight of these extremes of opulence and misery descending in the same lines from one generation to another, the accident of birth alone determining who shall continue in them through life, has not long ago extinguished ambition and effort, and rendered society torpid and motionless. In the learned professions, indeed, and in manufactures and trade, there is some room for changes of fortune, and therefore some incitement to activity. But even here the deadening influence of a fixed hereditary transmission of employment and social condition is felt. We have heard of one family in London which has sold tea at retail, on the same stand, through five generations. The institution of castes among the Hindoos affords the only parallel to such a social state, though even the Pariahs might compassionate "the irretrievable helotism of the working classes" in Great Britain, and the Brahmins wonder at the prejudices of the English aristocracy.

What a contrast to this state of things is afforded by the aspect of society here in America! Wealth here circulates as rapidly as the money which is its representative. A great fortune springs up, like the prophet's gourd, in a night, and is dissipated by some unforeseen accident on the morrow. Every one is made restless and anxious by this exposure to sudden change; but one great good comes of it, that it keeps down permanent discontent, and stifles the jealousy that is usually nursed by social differences and inequalities of fortune. How is it possible, indeed, that the poor should be arrayed in hostility against the rich, when the son of an Irish coachman we are not supposing a case becomes the governor of a State, and the grandson of a millionnaire dies a pauper? Hence the institution of property is really more secure here than in any other country on the globe, because it is defended, not only by those who are partakers for the time being of the power and enjoyment which it confers, but by those who hope-nay, who actually expect to share with them in this respect hereafter; and these two classes embrace the whole of the community. Men are generally unreasonable enough to defend their expectations with more zeal and ardor than their actual possessions; to rob one of an expected benefit, which has been the object of his hopes and exertions for months or years, is usually felt by him as a more serious injury than the taking away of wealth of which he has long considered himself as the undoubted owner, and therefore has spent no thought upon it. The consequence of the whole is an unceasing energy and activity in the pursuit of wealth, which accomplish greater wonders than all the modern inventions of science, which actually generate enthusiasm of character, and are regarded by foreigners with surprise and distrust, as the token of some constitutional disease in the body politic. Even the Irish immigrant here soon loses his careless, lazy, and turbulent disposition, and becomes as sober, prudent, industrious, and frugal as his neighbours. Nearly all the enormous fortunes that have been gathered in this country are the growth of a single lifetime, and therefore, even if they were more evenly distributed than they now are at the death of their founders, there would not be a smaller number of them in the succeeding generation. Consequently, they are regarded as the prizes of industry, economy, and enterprise,

and the sight of them stimulates and sustains exertion, instead of chilling and repressing it, which is the effect produced by the fixedness in certain families of the vast hereditary estates in our mother land. To begin with little or nothing is no discouragement here, while it is the almost certain commencement, in England, of a lifetime of toil and penury.

That riches are not the only good, however, and that the constant strain of the faculties, the restlessness, the feverish anxiety to get on, which are seen in the eager pursuit of them, are not the most desirable habits or traits of character, nor the most conducive to the real welfare either of the individual or of society, we are quite as ready as Mr. Mill to admit. But the following lively picture, which he draws, of this aspect of American life, though true in some respects, is overcharged in others, and is unfaithful because incomplete.

"I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or any thing but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The Northern and Middle States of America are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favorable circumstances; having, apparently, got rid of all social injustices and inequalities that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to insure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and they have no poverty: and all that these advantages do for them is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters.” Vol. 11. pp. 308, 309.

No, Mr. Mill, it is not all. The energies which are first awakened in the pursuit of wealth soon find other objects on which to expend themselves, and the gratifications of the taste and the intellect are as eagerly sought here as in the Old World. Hereditary fortunes unquestionably give more spare time to their possessors; but abundance of leisure is not the only requisite for the attainment of the higher graces of life. Activity of mind is at least equally essential, and

those who are born to vast estates and high social position are more apt to allow their faculties to rust from disuse, or to turn them in search of trivial or gross amusement, than those who are obliged first to achieve these advantages by their own efforts. Letters, science, and the arts find ardent votaries even in this paradise of dollar-hunters; the progress of invention in the elegant as well as the useful arts is probably more rapid here than in Great Britain. Yankee ingenuity has long been proverbial, and Mr. Mill allows himself to be blinded by the representations of mere caricaturists, if he supposes that this ingenuity is all expended in devices how to grow rich. We have philanthropists and reformers, too, who are not deficient either in numbers or in zeal; whatever we may think of the wisdom of their proceedings, they certainly are not seeking for wealth; yet they strive, and cry, and jostle each other with an earnestness and vigor, compared with which the exertions of the money-changers seem tame and feeble. We have just proved to the world, that the passion for military glory is as rife on the banks of the Ohio and the Mississippi as among the countrymen of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Or, to take a more agreeable illustration, compare Lowell with Manchester in respect to the care which is taken for the moral and intellectual training of the operatives, and then say over which city the statue of Plutus should be placed as the sole presiding deity. During the past twenty years, more has been accomplished here in the cause of popular education than the joint efforts of the Parliament, the Church, and the landed gentry have effected in England since the beginning of the century. Forty per cent. of the English people cannot write their names; while the last census found but one half of one per cent. of the population of Massachusetts in this condition, and most of these were probably recent immigrants from Great Britain.

While Mr. Mill is commenting on this eagerness in the pursuit of wealth, which appears to him so prominent a trait in the American character, he seems to forget the remark that we have already quoted from him, on the great liberality with which this wealth is expended for public objects. Rapid alternations of fortune do not lead to contracted views of the use of riches, or to penurious habits; we may be a speculating, but we are not a miserly people. A fortune which