impecunious Pashas, who now recognize that, granted political stability, the district from Pera to Therapia would, from its beauty and its wealth of local advantages, be more valuable than any area of equal dimensions in Europe.

Then also this joint administration, Turkey supported by Austria, would solve the religious difficulty. According to the Mahommedan faith, no inch of territory may be yielded to the infidel; but there is nothing which precludes the Sultan from accepting an eligible tenant, who would respect His Majesty's position as an historic Suzerain. Of more force I think is the alleged objection that Hungary would be alarmed at so large a numerical addition to the present preponderance of the Slavic element in the Austrian Empire. But it is hardly necessary to point out that there is all the difference in the world between an Empire, and a federal union with an emperor as its nominal head. Slavic affinities have recently so entirely failed to reconcile Bulgaria to the certainty of perpetual interference from St. Petersburg that, granted conditions of strict Home Rule, the ethnical objection will hardly prove a barrier to the acquiescence of Hungary.

I have briefly and imperfectly outlined in these pages that solution of the

Eastern question which alone seems possible in view of the crisis at hand, the solution also which will make of the Queen's Indian subjects at all times a willing soldiery. It is also the solution which affords the best prospect of finality, which is most compatible with national obligations, with the balance of power, and the peace of Europe during the coming century. If, as it appears to me, Austria has during the past few years come within the right lines to settle this Home Rule question for all mankind by the development of a federal system, do not the Great Powers owe it to Austria to recognize in this way her liberal and constitutional efforts? It may well be that, not much later, the federal principle will have to obtain universally, and that those nations which reject it at the dictation of despotic sovereigns, or of not less despotic ministers, will have to be coerced into accepting it, because only thus can the world be safeguarded from the awful devastation of modern warfare. It will be a strange instance, indeed, of the irony, and the irresistible justice of Fate, if Russia's recent creation, for her own selfish ends, of the Danubian Principalities is destined to culminate in a result so magnificent as this.-Nineteenth Century.

-Murray's Magazine.

PART IV. I. THE MENTAL AND MORAL QUALITIES WHICH CONSTITUTE THE ABILITY OF THE BOURGEOISIE.

TWENTY men are grinding at one mill, one is taken and nineteen are left. Nineteen remain to the end of their lives wage-workers; the twentieth, through various stages, raises himself to be a master and a capitalist. All would wish to do as this one has done; but only this one has done so, and yet he in most points may have seemed no cleverer than his "mates.' To what then does he owe his advancement? Does he owe it to luck, which gives him some push forward? This might account for his case were it solitary and not typical. But it is typical, there is nothing peculiar about it, it represents the history of the whole modern manufacturing and capitalistic class. Any one who studies the rise of this class, and compares its numbers and its wealth even so lately as a hundred years ago, with its numbers and its wealth now, will see that the larger by far the larger part of it, is composed of men who have owed nothing to luck whatever, who have had no interest or education to help them more than their fellows, who have had no special opportunities beyond those of their own making, and who have raised themselves solely by some qualities of their own, from the ordinary level of the working and wage-earning people. Thus has been formed that class in which mainly reside the progressive elements in the industrial activity of the world.

That the political common-sense, the refinement, the knowledge, or any of what are called the higher qualities of the world, reside mainly or even noticeably in it, I do not say. I am speaking of industrial activity only, of energy as directed to the production of material products and commodities. This form of energy I have called productive ability, and it is to their personal possession of the various qualities that come under this head, that the active capitalistic class, or, as the Socialists call them, the bourgeoisie, owe their wealth and their position.

I am now going to call the reader's attention to a subject I only glanced at in my last article, and which must form my point of departure for what I have yet to say. I mean the nature of the qualities to which I have just alludedthe qualities which are embodied in the modern capitalistic classes, and which they have not only used, but, it may be, grossly misused,-the qualities which differentiate these classes from the laboring masses of mankind. Of course, among them, as I have said already, are inventive and scientific genius, and many other forms of intellectual eminence; but these, as I have said also, only constitute productive ability when they are allied with a practical spirit; and on the whole, this same practical spirit is perhaps even more important than the intellectual eminence. In other words, the conduct of industry, and the progress of manufacture and commerce, depend on qualities that come under the head of character, as much, at all

events, as they depend on qualities that come under the head of mind. As an example of this, I may cite a case that happened very lately to come under my own observation. Two men entered into partnership for manufacturing a certain engine of which they had bought the patent. A considerable sum of money was sunk in the required plant and machinery, and a few of the engines were produced and sold; but a few only -the demand was small and slow. One of the partners who possessed most mechanical talent, and had himself been instrumental in improving the construction of the engine, began to despair of any success in the venture; he was beginning to look on the capital he had invested as lost, and was anxious that the business should be wound up. And wound up it would have been, but for the character of the other partner, a man inferior in many ways to his friend, but superior to him in perseverance and pushing, practical shrewdness. This man insisted that if time were only allowed the merits of the engine were sure gradually to be recognized, and that it would command a lucrative sale. His prophecy proved correct, and the partners are beginning already to see some return for their money. Had the manufacture ceased when but a few engines had been sold, the exchange value of the products of this industry would have been not a twentieth part, probably, of the wages paid the laborers. As it is, though the laborers are still absorbing money, the exchange value of the product is catching, or has caught, their expenses up; in other words, bids fair to yield, or is yielding, what is commonly called profit on capital. Thus the whole difference between loss and gain, between an exchange value so small that it would not pay the wages of labor, and an exchange value so large that it exceeds them-all this is the product of one man's productive ability, the ability being in this case a certain shrewdness and perseverance of charac

ter.

Instead, however, of discussing further the variety of forms under which ability exhibits itself, I will point out the main characteristics in which all these varieties agree. They agree in operating on production indirectly,

**

through their own operation on labor; and the amount of exchange values produced by them depends primarily on their possessing this common quality, that of influencing simultaneously a large number of laborers, and the production of a large number of commodities. The laborer can be at work at but one task at a time; the possessor of ability can be influencing a thousand laborers, and thus be at work at once on a thousand tasks. And this it is which forms the radical difference between ability and skilled labor. Certain forms of skilled labor may be rarer and more exquisite than certain forms of ability, but they will not produce so great an amount of exchange value-so great or nearly so great." Indeed the necessity for labor of a very high order in the production of certain commodities may actually, instead of adding to their exchange value, tend to reduce it, till it falls below the cost of production. A curious instance of this may be found in one of the most beautiful pieces of mechanism ever invented, the chronometer of Thomas Mudge, the wellknown mechanician and astronomer of the last century. This timekeeper, as originally made by its inventor, has hardly been excelled for the reliability and accuracy of its performances, and might, but for one circumstance, have formed the subject of a highly profitable manufacture. Mudge, however, had not only the ability of the inventor, but also, in an even rarer degree, the skill of a delicate laborer, and the one or two chronometers which he had a personal share in finishing answered all his expectations; but it was found almost impossible to secure other labor equally skilled with his own, and his chronometers when made by slightly inferior operatives proved failures. The manufacture was accordingly dropped, and their place was taken by rivals which embodied a larger exchange value in proportion to the labor bestowed on them, for the very reason that this labor was not so exceptionally skilled; or, to put the case in a slightly different way, because the ability em

bodied in them had a larger field of labor which it could act upon.

Such, then, indicated in general terms, being the nature and operation of productive ability, let us now turn to a question with regard to it, which for practical purposes is even more 'important than its definition. It is a question I have glanced at before; but we must look at it now more closely. It is the question whether, and how far, the possessors of this ability have really an unalterable monopoly of it. Is this exercise of it due to their position? or is their position due to their being naturally gifted with it? In other words, is there any reason, or what reason is there, to suppose that if the present capitalistic classes were dispersed or deposed the same amount of ability could be secured from other sourcesand not only from other sources, but upon wholly different social terms?

II.-IS PRODUCTIVE ABILITY A NATURAL MONOPOLY OF A MINORITY?

The supposition that ability could be thus easily secured is evidently implied in all constructive Socialism, and even in all schemes of extreme social reform: and as there are certain considerations which make the supposition plausible, I shall first touch briefly on these, and explain how we are misled by them.

No doubt we can find numerous individual cases in which we may compare a laborer and a director of labor, and say with truth that so far as the men's capacities go, their positions might be reversed without the results being affected, and that who the director is, is a mere matter of accident. But such cases are not representative of the situation. The character of the minority in which ability resides is to be judged of by its stronger members, not by its weaker. The latter belong to it only from being embedded, as it were, in circumstances which are created by the former; and they are supported and guided by the former in the performance of their functions, as cowardly soldiers in a battle are supported by brave companions. Putting, however, cases of this kind aside, and taking only those in which ability is so distinctly above labor that it would be absurd to suppose that any

chance laborer could exercise it, it may yet be thought that such existing inequalities in capacity are largely due to inequalities of opportunity, and would be incalculably diminished by equality of education.

This argument, however, loses much of its plausibility the moment we realize what I have pointed out already, that ability is a matter of character and temperament, even more than of intellect, and that one of its special characteristics is that it makes its own opportunities, and uses whatever it learns in common with others merely as a fresh starting-point from which to distance them. Its distinguishing mark is its activity, not its receptivity. People forget this, and overestimate the levelling results of education, because they see, in epochs when education is partial, that the possession even of knowledge which might conceivably be acquired by any one, places its possessors at an immense advantage and invests them with many of those powers that have just been attributed to ability. But the answer to this is that, under such circumstances, the possession of such knowledge does represent ability, and that though the knowledge, when got at, might be easily digested by any one, yet under the circumstances access to it was difficult, and exceptional ability alone was prompted or able to achieve it. Thus there have been times when reading, writing, and arithmetic have qualified men to control labor, though had these acquirements only been general they would not in themselves lift any one above the level of a laborer. No doubt, in one sense, it was circumstance to which these men owed their superiority; but their ability resided not in their power of learning, but in their seizure on the circumstances that enabled them to learn. The kingdom of education has been like the kingdom of heaven : the violent have taken it by force, and knowledge has fallen mainly to the share, not of the aptest, but of the most determined scholars. In proportion, however, as education becomes general, its special association with ability becomes less and less, and we see not how much but how little the diffusion of the former can affect the distribution of the latter. Indeed, the main effect