'The Times, Thursday, September 10, 1885.

The British Association meets this year at Aberdeen under a certain sense of contrast. Last year it made a great and adventurous experiment. It crossed the Atlantic and set up its tent for the first time in one of the British colonies. This year it returns to the normal current of its traditions. The experiment of last year, great as was its success, could not, of course, be immediately repeated. No doubt science is truly catholic, as Sir Lyon Play-Fair tolls us, and is bounded only by the universe. But the British Association cannot as yet explore the further limits of its domain. Jupiter and Saturn, to say nothing of the new star in Andromeda, are not yet included within the ample bounds of the British Empire. The Association cannot go to them if it would, though, if it could, it might be able to tell us what has become of political economy, once regarded as a science, but now decried and contemned—not, indeed, by a man of science—as the "convenient cant of" selfish, wealth." True to the law of its own particular being, the Association has to be content, as a rule, with the narrower limits of the British Isles. From that vantage ground, as from any other which this limited globe affords, it can survey the universe in all its extent, and project its inquiring glance as far as the utmost limits of space and time. But the sense of contrast between Aberdeen and Montreal, between Scotland and Canada, between a little island in the corner of Europe and the great American Continent, cannot but be present to the imagination of 411 members of the Association who have taken part in both meetings. The contrast, however, is by no means to be regarded as all unfavourable to page break the meeting of the present year. The material size of a country is no necessary element in the intellectual greatness of its inhabitants. Greece was a small place, but its intellectual grandeur still surpasses that of the New World. If the Persian had conquered and Aristotle had never lived, or had lived only in a Greece enslaved to the East, neither Europe nor America would be what they are to-day. We might easily enlarge on the debt which the world owes to the greatness of little countries. Without travelling beyond the instances cited by Sir Lyon Playfair for another and less generous purpose, we might show how Erasmus, a native of Holland, and Shakespeare and Bacon, Englishmen both, had determined the courses of modern culture, and how all of them, Whether they acknowledged the descent or not, were the intellectual offspring of Greece and the direct product of its reviving influence on humanity. But modern science is impatient of reflections such as these. Like Bacon, it denies or ignores its own parentage. Its heritage is in the future and its dwelling in the ideas of to-day. It may, therefore, easily be that it measures the contrast between Montreal and Aberdeen by a too material standard, and thinks it somewhat of a descent to visit the latter in succession to the former. It may take some comfort, however, from a juster historical view of the matter. It is the glory of Montreal to have invited the British Association to Canada; we trust it is no heresy to say that it is the greater glory of Aberdeen to have encouraged Erasmus to come to England.

There is, moreover, another reflection irresistibly suggested by the meeting at Aberdeen. More than a quarter of a century ago the Association met for the first time in that city, and its President was, to borrow Sir Lyon Playfair's words, a great Prince. Time corrects many hasty judgments, and death, as Bacon says, "openeth the gate to good "fame and extinguished envy." When the presidency of the British Association was offered, in 1859, to the late Prince Consort, there were some who thought that the offer and its acceptance were alike mistakes. The first impulse of the Prince himself was, as he declared in his address, to regard the thing as impossible. But the impossibility was accomplished, the critics were silenced, and the Prince abundantly vindicated his fitness to illustrate and adorn the position which the Association had invited him to occupy. At this distance of time, now that the rare intellectual page break qualities of the Prince Consort have been universally recognized, it is more natural to wonder that his selection should over have been criticized than that he should have been able to justify it. Certainly no greater testimony to the intrinsic and permanent value of the Prince Consort's Address to the Association in 1859 could be desired than the fact that Sir Lyon Playfair, the President of the present year, selected as the text of his own discourse some pregnant remarks made by his illustrious predecessor on the relation of science to the State. Six-and-twenty years have elapsed since the British Association last mot at Aberdeen, and we are still engaged with some of the problems which the Prince Consort propounded to his hearers on that occasion. Sir Lyon Playfair is still dissatisfied with the encouragement given by the State to the advancement of science. He points with reproachful envy to the larger efforts made in this direction by countries less wealthy than our own. Germany has equipped Strasburg with a University which has cost nearly three-quarters of a million to rebuild, and receives an annual grant of £43,000. France has rebuilt her provincial colleges at a cost of £3,280,000, while her annual budget for their support now reaches half a million sterling. The United States, lavish in proportion to the national resources and the national development, have reserved 150,000,000 acres of the national land for the promotion of scientific education. By the side of efforts such as these the encouragement afforded in England to science by the State sinks into insignificance. We acknowledge the reproach, but the question is not without other aspects than those on which Sir Lyon Playair chiefly dwelt. After all, the State is very much what the individuals who compose it choose to make it. Germany spends largely on science and scientific training, because the people of Germany have long learnt to set a high value on intellectual culture; Prance is now learning the same lesson in the bracing school of adversity. The United States lore to do things on a grand scale, and their page break immense natural resources enable them to make, with no vast immediate sacrifice, a magnificent provision for the future. England is very differently situated. We have no such natural resources as America, we have no such active and prevalent belief in intellectual culture as Germany, and we have had to learn no such terrible lesson as France. Our educational resources, derived from ancient endowments, are vast, though it may be conceded to Sir Lyon Playfair that they are still largely misapplied. They could be almost indefinitely increased, without direct assistance from the State, if vested interests and lack of intelligent initiative did not so often stand in the way. Until these obstacles are removed by the pressure of an active and enlightened public opinion, the State itself can hardly be expected to do much more than it does. The same public opinion which would apply our existing resources to greater advantage would also quicken the action of the State in the same direction. But, until that opinion exists in an organized and effective shape, the demand for the encouragement of science by the State will be addressed, for the most part, to a faithless and unbelieving generation.

At the same time, we are inclined to think that, though Sir Lyon Playfair's reproaches are for the most part well-founded, it is not science, as matters stand at present, that has most reason to complain. The need for a thorough-going reorganization of our system of superior education—a reorganization in which science would assume its proper and rightful place—is hardly so much as recognized in this country. But, so far as it is recognized, it is science that gets the benefit of the recognition. So much is this the case that it is often difficult to get a hearing from men of science for the claims of other elements of mental culture. Men of science, as a rule, have nothing but contempt for what they are pleased to call "mere literary training." Even Sir Lyon Playfair, who does his best to hold the balance even, and whose address would be reduced almost to a caput mortuum if every element of literary culture and historical training were eliminated from it, cannot resist the temptation of being unjust to the sources of much of his own inspiration. "While the teacher of literature," he says, "rests on authority and on books for his guidance, the teacher of science discards authority, and depends on facts at first hand, and on the book of nature for their interpretation." This, we take the liberty of saying, is a very unjust page break and very unworthy remark. The true object of literature, it has been well said, is to see things as they are, to know the world as it is; the true object of science cannot be anything else. The methods may be different, but the end is the same. The book of nature does not interpret itself. It has taken the best efforts of the greatest of human minds to interpret a few of its pages. Science is not, as Sir Lyon Playfair acknowledges, an accumulation of unconnected facts. In what essential point, then, does the interpretation of nature, the correlation by science of unconnected facts, differ from the interpretation by literature of human action and experience? Books are as necessary to the one method as they are to the other. The student of biology gets his conception of natural selection from the "Origin of Species," the student of cosmical physics still studies the "Principia." Authority counts for as much or as little in science as it does in literature. We account Aristotle a great philosopher, not because authority bids us, but because we can, if we choose to take the trouble, ascertain the fact for ourselves. Many of the truths of science are accepted on precisely the same grounds. If they were not, if every conclusion of science had to be verified afresh by every student who accepted it, the progress of science would be rendered almost impossible. We regret all the more that Sir Lyon Playfair should thus have seemed to take a side in the groat controversy between science and letters, because in the greater part of his address he has evidently done his best to do equal justice to the two. It is not at all necessary to depreciate literary training in order to vindicate the legitimate claims of science to a place in superior education. We are all ready to recognize those claims, and if science were as fair to literature as literature has long been to science, the controversy would soon be ended. No true humanist can desire to underrate the services of science to mankind. Many a man of science would be the better for trying to do justice to the claims of humane letters we would oven go so far as to commend to Sir Lyon Playfair, and his brothers in science at Aberdeen, the wise words of a champion of humane letters. "A poor humanist," says Mr. Matthew Arnold, may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their present favour with the public, to be far greater than his own, and still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have page break to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science, and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the need in him for beauty."

Any voice that happens to be raised in this country in favour of change always awakens an immense number of echoes. Many people who decline to accept a novel proposition as it stands are yet ready to assume that there must be something in it, and to devise remedies of their own for evils of which they have become suddenly and vaguely conscious. Politicians are always desperately nervous lest there should chance to be political capital in any new cry, and generally join in it more or less heartily merely by way of destroying their opponents' monopoly. Just at present nearly everybody is a land reformer, not because everybody has been convinced by serious study that land reform is necessary, or knows how to set about reform, supposing it to be necessary, but simply because considerable clamour is being made in some quarters and very violent remedies are being noisily advocated. At one end of the scale we have men like Lord Hartington, who keep their hold firmly enough upon the leading economic conditions of the case, yet countenance some rather vague and formless aspirations for legislative improvement of the system of land transfer. At the other end we have theorists like Mr. Chamberlain, who appear utterly unconscious that such things as invariable sequences of cause and effect exist in the sphere of economics, and are prepared to undertake the summary suppression by Act of Parliament of climate, history, the market, and human nature. The aggregate of talk upon the subject is all in favour of extreme men, because it tends to the subversion of sound convictions, and encourages the growth of that helpless bewilderment which finds expression in the most dangerous of political formulas—something must be done. People who are reduced to believing that something must be done, because they no longer know what ought not to be done, are ready to swallow any absurdity and assent to any folly. Their favourite resource is to "split the" difference "—in other words, to adopt some illogical compromise between common sense and the most preposterous demands that happen to have page break been made. Nothing suits the extreme men better, for they do not confine their demands to what they expect to got, and there is no finality about arrangements based on no principle.

The advocates of a general creation of peasant proprietors in this country are few in number, and fewer still are those whose advocacy could be thrown into forms definite enough to guide the draftsman of an Act of Parliament. But there are a considerable number who in a vague way would like to plant more people out on the soil, and vaguely believe that, though legislation cannot reorganize the whole land tenures of the country, it can by benevolent interference partially set aside the market, or get rid of the consequences of generations of development. To begin with the modest plea for simplification of transfer, it seems doubtful whether the real nature of the problem has been apprehended by many who join in the cry. There is really plenty of land to be bought, and its actual purchase is neither very difficult nor very expensive. What is both difficult and expensive is for the buyer to become quite certain that the seller has the right to sell. The difficulty is much less in most other countries, not because their laws are better, but because their history is different. English land is difficult to deal with simply because it has been freely dealt in for a longer time, and on a larger scale, than the land of other countries. Its history is scattered through deeds and contracts, while in France or Prussia we have only to go back to the beginning of the century to find the history of the greater part of the soil methodically and unimpeachably given in manorial records. Because the task of effecting a clear and satisfactory registry is more difficult than elsewhere, we need not despair of accomplishing it, but we might at least begin by recognizing its real nature, instead of talking nonsense, as many do, about land being properly transferable on the same principle as ahorse. Again, when we consider schemes for improving the lot of agricultural folk, what necessity is there for ignoring the great economical fact, everywhere staring us in the face, that the very worst use to which a small capital can be put in this country is its investment in land? For reasons with which legislation has nothing to do, the return from money sunk in land is smaller than from any other investment whatever; yet people who desire to be thought men of business can conceive no more hopeful way of improving the page break position of the agricultural population than lending them money on condition that they invest it in a small holding. It is not landlords or legislators or Tories who have to be dealt with, but the hard facts of the market-place. Our correspondent "A. Y.," in the two interesting letters we have recently published, gives a vivid description of his own experience, contrasting the lot of labourers in his neighbourhood with that of small owners. Every one in contact with the facts can corroborate his views, and there is at least one fact to which he refers—the disappearance of the class of yeomen under modern conditions—palpable enough and striking enough to arrest the attention of the most superficial theorist. Why should we attempt the creation of a class of proprietor-labourers, when a similar class, historically rooted in the soil, and possessing advantages which we cannot confer on the new men, are unable to hold their ground? It is argued that railway and dock companies get power to take land on payment for their purposes, and that it is equally competent for the State to give powers of compulsory purchase to local bodies in order to promote the interests of agricultural labourers. Of course it is competent for the State to give such powers, but the real question is whether their exercise will in fact promote the interests of anybody. If men who got their land for nothing cannot live on it, how are labourers burdened with the debt of its market value to make the speculation pay?

According to Mr. Jesse Collings and other modern theorists, the rural population has been driven into the towns by the malignity of landowners and farmers, and means have to be found of replacing them on the soil, because the larger the number of persons who actually live on the land the better is it for the nation. It is only when we hear such sayings as these from the lips of our legislators, that we can fully appreciate Mr. Gladstone's light-hearted remark about the relegation of political economy to the exterior planets. The rural population has not been driven into the great towns, but has been attracted to them. The industrial development of the last half century has created an enormous demand for labour in towns, at rates of pay which offer overpowering temptations to country labourers. Not only so, but industry has gone forth to compete for labourers at their own doors. Any one who travels by rail and keeps his eyes and ears open will find that porters, platelayers, clerks, and often station-masters, speak the vernacular of the district. At page break every station it sets down among the green fields the railway enters into immediato competition with the local employers of labour. Once launched on their new life, whether in town or country, these men are lost to the farmer. It is, moreover, the best of the rural population, the most energetic, enterprising, and intelligent, who are drafted off, and the farmer has to pay higher wages than before for less effective labour. Abundant evidence of the increased cost and reduced efficiency of rural labour was given before the Duke of Richmond's Commission, and, indeed, the agricultural work of the country must have come to a standstill, had not machinery been brought in to supplement the labour of the reduced population. Farmers and landowners can no more control the market than can millowners. They have to pay what labour will fetch, just like other people, and the notion that they favour a process which takes away their best hands and raises the wages of those who remain is condemned alike by political economy and common sense. The drain of industry to the towns is the natural and necessary result of the existence of industries more remunerative than agriculture. It is a result which, on free-trade principles, Mr. Collings should find entirely admirable. For the keystone of our free-trade policy is that men should devote themselves to the industries which give the greatest exchange value in return for labour. If by going to a town and making cotton cloth a man can obtain the price of a greater quantity of wheat than he could grow with the same labour in the fields, then he is right to go to the town. If this be denied, then we comeback at once to protection and regulation of industry by artificial means, which, odd as it may seem, is what our advanced Radicals are now advocating under disguises which, perhaps, impose upon themselves. The whole of the current schemes for creating peasant-proprietors and for giving labourers allotments by public interference are, in fact, measures of protection for a particular industry. There is a good deal to be done in the way of improving the position of the agricultural labourer by means which wise landowners would adopt as a matter of business. Lord Tollemache and others who give allotments base their action on the ground that it is good for the estate as well as for the workmen. But when we go beyond business principles and embark upon schemes of benevolent interference in order to make country life conform to some ideal, we are simply offering subventions in aid of wages, no matter with what specious arguments we may endeavor to conceal the truth. But wages are fixed by the market, the essence of our fiscal policy page break is recognition of the folly of interfering with the market, and subventions, in whatever form, are bounties identical in kind with those of which our sugar refiners complain.

The French General Election has been fixed for Sunday, October the 4th, and the electoral struggle has now begun in good earnest. The Premier expounded his views at great length on Tuesday evening to the electors of the 10th Arrondissement, and the manifesto of the Royalist party is given by our Paris Correspondent this morning. We have already had occasion to comment upon the important speeches in which M. Ferry, rightly judging that a new Chamber opens a now chapter of political life, has preferred his claims to the confidence of the French people. A peculiar internet attaches to the coming election, because it is the first to be conducted upon the principle of scrutin de liste. Gambetta, notwithstanding, or perhaps on account of, his immense popularity, failed to procure the adoption of that electoral method, but since his death the ascendency of a commanding personality has certainly not been the most pressing danger of the Republic. On the contrary, the instability of the Administrations which have followed one another in quick succession has brought homo to men's minds the importance of measures for consolidating Parliamentary majorities. Scrutin de liste, which enables each elector to vote for all the representatives of his department, instead of for the representative of his electoral district alone, tends to eliminate purely local and personal influences, while giving increased importance to the discipline of party and the control of central organizations. Assuming discipline to be fairly good on all sides, rival parties vote, in American parlance, for their party "tickets," and success is won in largo slices instead of in crumb's. The result of the experiment about to be tried will be awaited with great interest, but the drawbacks of scrutin d'arrondissement, or, as we should say, the one man one vote system, had reached in France such serious dimensions as almost to compel recourse to a change of method. Deputies were fast sinking, not only into the position of mere delegates on public questions, but into the yet more degrading position of agents for the furtherance of their constituents' private ambitions. When a member of Parliament is one of a score chosen by the suffrages of a county, he obviously has a double protection against page break unworthy Solicitation he is not the sole representative of any man or coterie, but shares his responsibility towards each elector with nineteen of his colleagues, and, on the other hand, no strictly local interest is strong enough to make him feel its wrath, so long as he commands the confidence of the electoral body at large. The evils from which the French people are fleeing are palpable-enough; it remains to be seen what price they will have to pay for their escape, and what are the practical drawbacks of their new system.

English readers will be struck by the similarity of the earnest appeals made by M. Brisson and M. Ferry for the sinking of Republican differences and the presenting of a firm front to the common foes of all sections. The Monarchical fractions are apparently recognized by both as constituting a serious danger to the commonwealth. It will be seen from the manifesto of the Royalists that they are not sparing of their denunciations of the Republic. Indeed, the arguments of the two parties will remind many of us of a good deal that we have to listen to from more familiar lips. On one hand we have M. Brisson and M. Ferry, each in his own way begging the electors to give France a strong Government, to keep out of sight burning questions, such as the revision of the constitution and the separation of Church and State, and to furnish Republican Ministers with the means to "save the country." On the other hand, we have the Duc De Broglie and his friends denouncing the increase of expenditure, the growth of the national debt, and the war against the Church. They demand a strong and stable Government, resting upon a solid basis, and superior to parties, which in their view cannot be obtained without an executive power independent of the fluctuations of Republican opinion. M. Brisson claims for the Republic that it has restored the eastern frontier, refortified Paris, created a national army, erected thousands of schools, carried out great public works, and extended public liberty. The Royalists, on the other hand, profess to be the only persons who can guarantee the interests of society, revive commerce, lighten the burdens of agriculture, promote manufactures, and give true liberty to all. There is a curious family resemblance between the appeals of politicians in all countries, and at bottom there is probably an equal inability on the part of the average elector everywhere to accept them at their own estimate. M. Brisson is, no doubt, page break right; in believing that if the different sections of Republicans drop recriminations and show a capacity for compromise, the reactionary elements will have no chance. It is evident, however, that he is not altogether assured that this desirable moderation Will be practised. The common platform is one of opportunism and self-restraint, for which it is unquestionably difficult to excite enthusiasm, even when the Monarchists are lying in wait to attempt what the Premier very aptly describes as a "revolution backwards."

Moderate Liberalism occupiesa stronger position in France than among our solves, if we may judge from the tone of authority in which M. Ferry proscribes the exclusion from the Republican lists of men advocating extreme views. The disendowment of the Church may behold as a private opinion, but the lists are to be open only to those who consent not to attempt it for the next four years. The revision of the Constitution is a Republican idea, to which, in itself, M. Ferry does not object, but he holds that the unity of the party will be imperilled if men are put upon the lists who aim at immediately opening up the question. M. Brisson is equally earnest in pointing out how seriously the question of disendowment divides Liberal opinion, and in bogging that it may be altogether excluded from the programme of the party. The urban population, as both speakers pointed out in their own ways, has adopted the Republic after its appropriate fashion, which is not the fashion of the towns. It is not to be fatigued by a pace suited only to the more ardent spirits of Paris and the industrial centres. Above all things it is necessary that the Republic should be a Government, and the Republicans are urged in different tones, but with perfect unanimity, to push no views that may weaken the cohesion of the party. The result of the elections will show how far this advice commends itself to the French people, and whether M. Ferry's confident tone or M. Brisson's more plaintive and deprecatory one best suits the conditions springing out Of the actual temper of the Republicans. The Government of the day has always exercised a groat influence upon the course of French elections, and that influence will probably still be felt to some extent. It is announced, however, in a circular by the Minister of Education that the strictest impartiality will be observed by the Government, and that it expects similar conduct from all schoolmasters and public functionaries. An honest attempt to put down bureaucratic interference, coupled with the novel electoral arrangements now in force, makes the forthcoming elecpage breaktion as interesting to political students abroad as is important for Frenchmen themselves.