of rescue. Ah! if an elastic trade comes back to-morrow, you can
never make those people what they were; ought we not to have
forecast that they should not be what they are? But I contend
that depression has become chronic, the poverty more wide-spread
and persistent--how then shall we, who represent these classes
among the rest, face the prospect?"

Here interposed a gentleman high in office, a pure, keen, rigid
economist of the highest intellectual and political rank.

"My dear Sterling, pardon me if I say you are talking wildly.
Perhaps you don't see that you are verging on rank communism.
The working of economic laws can be as infallibly projected as a
solar eclipse. You can secure no class from periodic calamity,
and so regulate laws of supply and demand by guiding-wheels of
legislation and taxation as to save every man from penury. You
wish us to send away our bone and sinew because we have no
present employment for it, and next year, or the year after,
under a recovered trade you will be wringing your hands and
cursing the folly that prompted you to do it."

"I should be too glad of the opportunity," replied Sir Charles,
sturdily, "but in truth there is an incubus of excessive numbers
that no revival of trade will provide for, even if it is beyond
our extremest hopes, and I for one will not be guilty of the
inhumanity of keeping fellow-creatures in misery till we can find
a use for them. You have forgotten that there are other economic
laws besides those you glance at. Several millions of acres of
unoccupied land belonging in a sense to the people of this
country are to be kept untilled in defiance of the plainest