amount of deduction had reached 10l., the process would be perfectly simple. Sir, will you employ me?' 'Yes, at such and such wages. How old are you?' 'Twenty.' 'Twenty.' 'Then show me your insurance card.' If he have completed his insurance, he has his card to show, and the employer will have nothing to deduct. If, on the other hand, it appears that only 7., instead of 10l., has been paid, the employer will answer, I shall have such and such a weekly deduction to make.' If the labourer refuse to work under such terms, he will fare no better elsewhere, since any employer who fails to deduct and pay in the due proportion to the Post Office, will know that the labourer himself will be able to sue him for it, and require him to pay it a second time. Thus there need be no registration, the wageearner will be his own inspector of payments, and a very sharp one too, and the collection of the money will work of itself. The employer, in his own interest, will be the collector; the labourer, in his own interest, the inspector; the Post Office, in the national interest, the banker. For the entry of the first payment on the collecting card, it will certainly be necessary to indicate the age of the insurer. But, must we have an entire national system of registration for this? The notion just shows how very little details are thought out' by some people. Every member joining a benefit society now (and I suppose the Reviewer will join me in saying every working man ought to belong to one) gives, and without difficulty, evidence of his birth. And by the time we have National Insurance, we shall have also another inexpensive means of ascertaining and recording the ages of all insurers-made to our very hand in the 'child's school-book' and the school record of age, which works just such an enormous registration as has been suggested, practically at no cost at all!

The Reviewer has next an impressive remark to make upon the departure from all the habits of English life and administration which the change would imply.'

But I ask, What is any new law but a departure from habit and a change in administration? And if our habits be admittedly bad in this matter of pauperism, and our administration faulty, I see no good reason why, in the name of common sense, we should not agree to change them.

Next we come to the difficulty in the way of employers not consenting to make the deductions from the wages of those they employ.' Again, I say, the Reviewer has not 'thought out the details. The thing is done in Germany universally without difficulty, though the process is enforced on employers through every working week of all their workmen's lives, instead of only through three years. The thing has been done for ages by the old East India Company throughout all her services; the thing is done without refusal or difficulty by deduction from the pay of every soldier in the army now; the thing is done by many public establishments, by nearly all large private

establishments, and done under less popular conditions and under greater difficulties. Need I say more? Any one who has 'thought out the details' ought to know that from 1696 to 1851, a period of 157 years, a deduction from wages of workmen by employers was enforced by law on a very large and important section of our wageearners, though that deduction was made to secure a pension, not for themselves, but for other men. Sixpence a month ('the Greenwich sixpence') was deducted from every merchant seaman's wage during all those years to provide pensions for seamen of the Royal Navy; and that system was not resisted, not complained of, not rebelled against, but actually abandoned after more than a century and a half, not because of its injustice, which no one seemed to notice, but because of its insufficiency to effect the purpose for which it was established!"

The Saturday Reviewer touches next the possible unwillingness of the working men to allow the deduction to be made; which I hope to treat at length elsewhere, and will show to afford very little cause for anxiety. But he next assumes that the employers would have to pay the money. This assumption I have combated many times, and have even touched in this article; but no one asserts it, so far as I know, who has read through my essays in this and other Reviews, and my Reply to Mr. Edwards.'7

But I may say one word more of this, as quoting a specimen of how the Reviewer enters into details.' Figures are fearful things! He

says

To render the employer responsible would be a very serious matter. The employer of 1,000 work-people, for instance, would be bound to pay 501. a week, or 2,6007. a year. It is nonsense to say he would be compensated by the abolition of poor rates.

So this writer knows so little of the main outlines of the proposal he falls foul of as not to have noticed at all its chief feature-the payment of the money only during three early unburdened years of life, and the freedom of the person insured from all compulsion afterwards.

I do not like to seem rude, but I must retort that it is nonsense to say' that an employer of a thousand workpeople employs nobody under eighteen and nobody over twenty-one! And yet this is what the writer must be held to mean if he has made his objection after 'thinking out the details' of the plan.8

• This history of the 'Greenwich sixpences' affords a very striking incidental illustration of the sufficiency even of my supposed minimum (4s. per week) in preventing pauperism. The Greenwich pensions amount to 2s. 6d. per week, and are suspended if recipients come upon the rates as paupers. The total suspensions thus caused are not more than 3 or 4 per 1,000!

7 Prevention of Pauperism, pp. 74-109.

This amusing mistake may well run in double harness with that made by a morning paper in criticising the suggestion of Compulsory Insurance made in my Westminster Abbey Sermon. The article ended: 'A nation of small annuitants would soon become a nation of hopeless idlers,' the writer failing to see that a nation of septuagenarians could, if it existed, scarcely be expected to work very hard!

Another point comes next to be noticed. The Reviewer quite overlooks the fact that it was never proposed to exact a compulsory insurance from any one above the age of twenty-one years at the passing of the law; and also, in his bird's-eye view of present actual and potential pauperism, he fails to consider-nay, does not seem even to think of considering-the different condition in which our nation would be when the generation in which the transition is made shall have passed away.

We have, lastly, three considerations put before us in the concluding paragraph, striking, no doubt, and true, after a fashion, but not by any means such as it can satisfy the heart of a philanthropist to neglect, or quiet the conscience of a statesman to ignore. We are told :

(1) Pauperism is to a large extent inherited, the pauper child seldom emerging from the state in which he was brought up, and always tending to fall back into it.

I answer this by saying that by making pauperism impossible to the youth of to-day we are cutting off at the source the supply of 'hereditary' paupers. If there can be no pauper fathers no children can inherit pauperism from them.

(2) A sanguine optimism may hope that education will gradually impart a new character to the population. But legislation is not to be founded on a sanguine optimism; and in any event the realisation of the hope is too distant to affect present legislation. Now, at any rate, we have a multitude of criminals, vagrants, and paupers, young as well as old, who have not, and never will have, the means of honestly paying a premium. Thus, when closely examined, this fine-sounding scheme, with all its pretensions, THROWS the support of the improvident and the ne'er-do-well on the well-to-do and the industrious, just as does the Poor Law.

I pray my readers to examine this assertion. If it be justified, it is an argument that because bad exists no one must attempt to amend it; or it amounts to. an assertion that the evil now existing, which National Insurance cannot touch and does not profess to touch, may be cast at the door of this as yet unaccomplished reform!-in other words, that a present evil can be due to a future measure! Now I beg to alter into terms which really apply to National Insurance the sentence I have italicised, feeling sure that if readers will first peruse the original, and then the paraphrase, they will see for themselves, without one word from me, how seriously the Saturday Reviewer, after a close examination, has misrepresented the proposal. For I would read it thus :

'This fine-sounding scheme, cutting off all future supply of pauperism, leaves a proportion, daily diminishing, of the present paupers (whom it never undertook to deal with) as a burden still on the well-to-do and the industrious, but cuts off, at the same time, the source of all future increase to the vanishing burden.'

And here is the Reviewer's last comfort for a nation to whom pauperism is a shame, a misery, a horror, and threatens to ruin

alike the body and the soul of our race. This is his doleful Envoi : 'Meanwhile we must accept pauperism as inevitable.' Or, in other words, because there is no help for spilt milk, we had better go on spilling it for ever!

But, is this the end of the whole matter? I would say to such a writer, 'Leave it alone! This spirit of despair is not the fitting frame in which to deal with a subject of the sort. Or, if you will not leave it alone, think it out; take some little trouble more than has been done to examine a suggestion and understand it, before condemning it and passing it by. We, at least, who do "think out details," who do examine closely, have a hope, and the hope is bright, and hold a confidence, for which we can give a reason, that in some such measure as Lord Carnarvon advocated there is a means of escape from evil, sorrow, degradation, and injustice, such as dishonour and demoralise no other nation in the universe besides our own. If this, indeed, be the sum of your counsel, I would say again, Leave us alone, till we have fought our fight and won our victory. If pauperism be inevitable, effort and failure can leave us no worse off than we are; if otherwise, what words can utter the measure of our gain? At all events it is worth trying for, thinking for, and praying for. But the man who tells thinking men that pauperism is inevitable in England, while it exists in no other nation on the globe, is not the safest guide to follow in a cause so great as this.'

For the rest, I have no sort of doubt or fear that this cause shall ever drop out from the minds of Englishmen till it have succeeded and been carried through. The thoughtful men, and they are many, in our nation have been grieving long over the hurt and hopelessness of our treatment of the poor. We have been drifting like a shipwrecked crew upon a tossing raft over a lonely ocean, fainting, dispirited, and depressed. Now and then one or another from the half-stupor of a joyous dream has cried, 'A sail! a sail!' and we have lifted up our languid eyes, only to be disappointed once again, and have opened our lips only to objurgate the fellow-sufferer's rashness in deceiving us anew. But now, indeed, at last, there is a sail in sight; and these objections we have been studying, as they rise and fall, are but the waves that hide it now and again from the weary sufferers upon the raft. Now we lift our eyes once more, and this time they are bright with hope; and now it is no longer one that cries and many that murmur, but all lift up their cry together. My countrymen are neither so modest nor so mad as, in a case like this, to let their chance of safety pass because they feel too shy to shout.

WILLIAM LEWERY BLACKLEY.

THE FRENCH CLERGY AND THE

PRESENT REPUBLIC.

THE Church and the Republic in France are passing through a fresh crisis which must be injurious to both of them, although in very different degrees. While misunderstandings, perhaps partly involuntary, but which are for the most part deliberately provoked, have placed the Republic in a state of warfare with the Church, Europe stands with crossed arms gazing with fixed eyes on France, awaiting the issue of the strife. It watches the spectacle with a painful interest, suspecting that there will be many victims; nor is it mistaken in this belief.

Placed as we are in the heart of the conflict our attention is divided between the shocks sustained by our unhappy country, and the notice they attract in other lands, but it appears to us that many spectators of passing events do not understand or estimate the importance of the strife. The complaints of the two opposite camps are misunderstood, and men are inclined to believe that those most to blame are in reality the most innocent. Responsibilities are ascribed to the Church which she does not accept, and she is supposed to be implicated in acts with which she has nothing to do, and which she would have prevented if it had been possible.

This is not the first occasion on which the conduct of the Church has been misunderstood, nor is it likely to be the last. Whether the errors of her opponents are involuntary or not, it is important that she should secure the sympathy of those spectators who are either indifferent or well-disposed, and for this reason the clergy are interested in explaining their attitude with reference to the republican institutions now established in France, and in giving a frank statement of the principles of their conduct.

They can do this without difficulty and without fear, since they have done nothing to be ashamed of; and if all classes of French society had done their duty as well as the clergy, France would not have fallen into the condition to which she is now reduced.

We believe that foreigners do not fully understand the present controversy, and that they ascribe ideas and aspirations to the clergy which the latter are far from entertaining. They are supposed to be systematically hostile to the Republic, and the present crisis is ascribed