accumulations; because from them wages are paid, and by them the field for labour is widened.

There is a striking analogy between the relations of labour and capital in the exchange of wealth, and those of the vegetable and organic kingdoms in the exchange of the gases which they respire. The two in each case are reciprocally dependent; and the free and extensive action of one promotes that of the other. The vegetable kingdom releases the oxygen which is indispensable to the life of the animal. The latter receives and lives by it, and returns through the atmosphere the carbonic acid which is useless to it, but is essential to the respiration of the plant. So the labourer furnishes the energy which produces wealth to the capitalist; without whose economy, knowledge, and enterprise he would have no sufficient civilized work to do, or fund to pay his wages. All is harmony, in the chemical interchange of mutually necessary commodities, between the vegetable and living kingdoms. They have no misunderstandings and no antagonisms; and all that is necessary to the reign of equal harmony between labour and capital is the removal of the misunderstanding which has misled the human media of these social forces to imagine an antagonism where there is really none, and the recognition that the most perfect fulfilment of the function of either will be best served by the freest and most intelligent action of the other.

Some persons still dream that the solution of the problem is only to be found in an equal re-distribution of wealth; and property has even been described as theft. But such visionaries evidently overlook the important law of human society, of the immense and inevitable disparity of human conditions; striking enough in the savage, but steadily augmenting in the civilized state. Were an equal division to be made to-morrow morning, it would not mend the matter; for by night another division would be necessary. Nay, more so. For every one would be at a loss, and every commercial and economical function would be paralysed. The more that increasing population augments the endless division of labour-the more this diversity of conditions and capacities is multiplied, together with the special circumstances and employments to which they are most appropriate; and so much the more is the function of the capitalist, as such, indispensable to civilized society.

For two thousand years philosophers have sought to evade the results of this diversity of conditions, and to establish communities in which all the advantages of co-operation might be secured, without as in modern communism, reducing the superior and the average,

individual to a level with the worst. Lycurgus lowered all thus to the condition of soldiers or savages. Plato and Aristotle recommended the extermination of all weak and imperfect children, and the payment of as much attention to breeding the best, as we use with our cattle and horses. But they all failed; though their objects were as good, and their method far more rational than our social practice. Modern communism disregards all the precautions against degeneration recommended by Plato, and its consequent tendency is to reduce all superior and average human nature to the very lowest and most inefficient type. Thus communism is the last resort of the incompetent, though it has been countenanced also by a few superior men who pity their condition, and would fain extend to them the obvious benefit of co-operation. Their experiments, however, have had but the briefest success, when in direct defiance of their own principles, the institution has been so far under the guidance and strong rule of a master mind like Robert Owen's, or of one of like relative superiority. But this cannot properly be called Communism, which is otherwise only a spurious imitation of co-operation, by which the incapable, the lazy, and the weak, finding themselves unable to compete with their superiors, are cunning enough to desire to bring all down to their own low standard. But in this spurious co-operation, it is obviously not the interest of the strongest, cleverest, and most energetic to take a share, and thereby abdicate the superiority with which nature has invested them. It is still less the interest of the human race in the present or the future that society in general should be deprived of the most efficient excellence of its best members. It is doubtless not proposed, and perhaps it is not intended, by any one thus to reduce all to the level of the worst. But that result would be inevitable; for where otherwise is the line to be drawn? There is no shade of gradation wanting between Newton's genius and a drivelling idiot's folly; between the wit of Voltaire and the ravings of a lunatic; between the astuteness of a Bismarck and delirium tremens. Were all these to be reduced to legislative restriction, or otherwise to a common minimum of activity and reward, what could result but social destruction? Nature, fortunately, renders Communism impossible; for this suicide of co-operation will always precede the destruction of society.

Legitimate co-operation, on the contrary, is based upon and fosters competition. It is in fact the effective social realisation of Darwin's great principle of natural selection; and is almost the only instance in which human conventionalism has not contravened the teaching

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of reason and nature. In contrast to nearly every conventional influence in relation to human increase, it establishes an organisation of the most capable and superior few, in self-defence against the deteriorating and average-lowering majority of the incapable and the lazy. This co-operation not only enhances to the individuals the advantages of their natural superiority, and pronounces and expands their social effect, but it also tends, by developing that superiority in their progeny in a geometrical ratio, to improve the future human race. This is Nature's method, and her only method, of improving the average; to make the most of and furnish every advantage to those whom she most highly endows; and she makes no more of those in any class below that average than she does of the savages who disappear before advancing civilization; or of the millions of acorns which serve but as the nutriment or manure for the benefit of the one which germinates and ultimately forms the oak. The survival of the fittest means that might-wisely usedis right. And thus we invoke and remorselessly fulfil the inexorable law of natural selection (or of demand and supply), when exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races, and we appropriate their patrimony as coolly as Ahab did the vineyard of Naboth, though in diametrical opposition to all our favourite theories of right and justice-thus proved to be unnatural and false. The world is the better for it; and would be incalculably better still, were we loyally to accept the lesson thus taught by nature, and consistently to apply the same principle to our conventional practice; by preserving the varieties most perfect in every way, instead of actually promoting the non-survival of the fittest by protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective, and the criminal. Thus we surely lower the average of, and tend to destroy, the human race, almost as effectually as if we were openly to resort to communism.

Co-operation has, on the other hand, a direct tendency to raise the intellectual and moral human average; enabling those who have a talent for organisation to profit individually by it more than would otherwise be possible; but the principal good that it does to the human race appears to lie in the additional pressure that it certainly brings to bear upon those who can neither work well, nor accumulate, nor co-operate. These, as least fitted to survive, are selected thus for extermination; and good citizens can all have better ground for the consolation, and should cultivate the moral feeling of the Spartan mother, who met the news of the death of her son for his country

with the exclamation, "Sparta hath many a worthier son than he!"

The labouring classes have in their own hands the power, if they could only recognise its value, to lighten their poverty and their labour, and to improve themselves indefinitely; and then to reap the benefit of far larger accumulations of the proceeds of their labour than have ever yet been made. They possess the power, and lack but that knowledge which I have above recommended and which it is the interest of society that they should have.

The foregoing conclusions may be summed up thus:

1. The interests of labour and capital must be identical, because high wages and large profits are as a rule concomitants.

2. It is the interest of capitalists, as well as of labourers, that the quality of labour should be improved rather than the quantity augmented.

3. It is the interest of labourers as well as of capitalists, that capital -from the interest upon which wages are paid-should accumulate as freely as possible.

4. The spread through all classes of the knowledge of natural laws is the best means of substituting rational harmony for the factitious antagonism which now tends to paralyse capital, and to degrade labour.

H. K. RUSDEN.

AN EPISODE IN CALIFORNIAN BANKING.

THE generally conservative character of English banking and the hard prosaic lives of men who devote themselves to its conduct, while they command the confidence of those pecuniarily interested, do not contain the elements out of which enthusiasm is evoked. The most solid success of modern times, that of the London and Westminster Bank, meets its highest reward in the formal vote of thanks accorded to the managing powers at the half-yearly meetings; and as this methodical compliment is passed with unswerving regularity and solemn decorum, alike as a congratulation on a good half-year or a condolence on a bad one, its value as a testimony of real feeling is open to question.

An extraordinary episode in the history of the Bank of California, which occurred in San Francisco within the last few months, places the peculiar characteristics of the American people and American banking in such vivid contrast to the reserved apathetic Englishman of the ordinary money-making type, that its details deserve a permanent record. The story of " Black Friday," the 27th August, 1875, has no parallel in the history of English panics, for those, in the great majority of instances, have been born of fear, and if suffi ciently long-lived have culminated in denunciation and a desire for the punishment of the persons by whom the panic-stricken have sustained loss; but, in the case to be now considered, the whole community regarded the possible failure of the bank as a national calamity, a discredit to them individually, and they not only refrained from denunciation but refused to allow any blame to be imputed to the management, while they were untiring in their efforts to support each other in refusing to accept the apparently inevitable.

Six months ago the Bank of California undoubtedly held the pride of place amongst the financial institutions of what the 'Friscans call "the Pacific Slope." It had half a dozen local rivals, but towered above them all in the magnificence of its premises, the number of its official staff, the extent of its deposits, the varied vastness of its business ramifications, the reputed wealth of its proprietary, and above all in the unbounded personal popularity of its manager, Mr. William Chapman Ralston.

This gentleman's character for princely hospitality has been