art, to the interest we take in the variety of events which form the great world-drama around us. The love of reading is the richest and the happiest gift to the children of men. "If," declares Sir John Herschel, "I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstance, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading." It is not every one who could say with Gibbon that he would not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies.

Dogberry may justly claim that reading and writing come by nature, yet a taste in them may be cultivated, although it is not apt to be done on rules mechanically applied. Reading is a matter of the emotions as much as of the intellect, and there can be no scientific methods of instruction. The taste is not produced by certain definite means, which may be analyzed and measured qualitatively or quantitatively, just as the composition and effectiveness of drugs; but it is instinct with its own laws, which it carries out spontaneously, correcting and modifying, rather by the aid of a natural sense than from principles formally laid down. The aim of every reader should be to acquire the art of sympathy, to cultivate sensibility, to relax intellectual rigidity, and to read sympathetically. We are more susceptible to the vital interpretation of literature, as we more steadily apprehend that our highest study is not to acquire views and facts, but sensations. Reading will render us more of itself as we bring to it more of ourselves. It is not necessary to be a philosopher to enjoy the pleasures of reading, for the practice need be by no means a study. While the tastes which require physical strength pass with age, that for reading steadily grows. It is illimitable in the vistas it opens; it is one of the most easily satisfied, as one of the cheapest, and it is one of the least dependent on age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life.

There are readers and readers. Some read to think, to

rouse the mind and employ the judgment-these are few; some read to write-these are common; some read to talk, following the advice of Burke to his son, diversifying the matter infinitely in their minds so as to apply it to every occasion that arises-these form the majority of readers. Some will read only old books, while others will read only new books. Some read for the express purpose of consuming time. Some have two distinct sorts of readings: one to enjoy and one to work by. There are the hard, pragmatic readers, and the sympathetic, responsive readers. Some are mercurial, while others are saturnine, the two general divisions under which Addison classes readers. Some read that their minds may sit still in repose. It was reading of this kind Longfellow must have appreciated when he penned his proem to "The Waif:"

Come, read to me some poem,

Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

Some love their books like Lamb, whose affection was expressed in the quiet kiss with which he greeted his bestloved volumes; or like Southey, whom Wordsworth, on a visit, found patting his books affectionately with both hands as he would a child. Others treat their books as some people do lords, inform themselves of their titles, and then boast of an intimate acquaintance. Sir William Hamilton seemed able to tear the entrails from book or paper by a glance, and forever to retain their contents." Lord Macaulay from youth to age was continuously occupied "gorging and enfeebling" his intellect by the unlimited consumption of every species of literature, from the masterpieces of the age of Pericles to the latest rubbish from the circulating library. Gibbon considered that his mind grew fastest in a certain year when he was under no regular teacher, but was left to "that free desultory reading which was," as he tells us, "the employment and comfort of his solitary hours."

All of us have some peculiar habits, relishes, and tastes in

reading, more or less pronounced, that the public might be entitled to regard as false or foolish. But certainly those who neither assume to dictate to the public, nor make any demand on public admiration should be permitted to find out where their strength and enjoyment lie, and indulge in a gratification which neither disappoints nor fails them.

To many of our children the pleasures of reading are locked and sealed by the attempt to force books upon them at an age unfit for their reading. Why should the young be compelled to associate books which would be a source of pleasure with the memory of hours spent in weary study? I would put a child into a library where no unfit books are, and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading anything that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the case, the child will soon find it out and desist; if not, he of course gains the instruction, which is much the more likely to come from the inclination with which he takes up the study. Happy the child who has the use of a good library, and who for a certain part of every day is allowed to read at random; who is "turned loose in the rich pasture of literature to browse where he pleases." It would be a wise practice in every school, with as much regularity as the morning prayer, to read aloud some fine or instructive passage from a book which is accessible to those who wish to read more. It is not needful that every word of what is read aloud should be understood by the hearers. If that were the case, the Epistles of St. Paul would be a sealed book to all but scholars. Children derive impulses of a powerful kind in hearing things which they cannot entirely comprehend; something they can always grasp, and what they cannot understand they either supply by some strange meaning of their own, or let it pass by unheeded. It is said a mother read to her children, who were under twelve, the whole of Spenser's "Faerie Queene." They had no conception of the allegory, but they took the shield of the red-cross knight in their play and lived over again in their imagination the life they had learned about.

Children should not be too systematically drilled and overtrained in their reading. We should not impose upon them too fastidious a standard, and demand that all they read must wear the clothes in fashion, conform to the courtesies of life, and be in conventional style; that they must remember to be right and good and wise, rigidly enforcing the rule of Cato, cum bonis ambula, as to their books, even if they grow dull and irksome. Nor is it necessary to erect the course of reading for children into a Draconian moral code. They will be sure to get what they want:

"What we are free to do we slight,

What is forbidden whets the appetite."

And are we not doing a graver wrong to the morals of the young by driving them to do things in secret, to steal that food which their constitution craves, and which under proper guidance might be made wholesome?

"To read, to think, to love, to pray, these are the things that make us happy," and they are necessary to the daily progression which should inevitably attend every one of us. We should heed the admonition of Goethe: "One ought every day at least to read a good book, to hear a little song, to see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." BOYD WINCHESTER.

30

THE HISTORICAL ORIGIN OF SLAVERY.'

BENEATH the burden of an exhausting system of cultivation and of a progressive advance to lands of less fertility, the land conditions of all colonies by degrees change. They are soon removed from their primitive productive state. The productivity of the soil, indeed, still continues to be great, but it is soon less than it was during the original period when first cultivated. So, in America, we find an acre under extensive cultivation yields twenty-five to thirty bushels of wheat, thirty-five to forty bushels of oats, and forty to fifty bushels of hay. The seed gives an eight to ten fold increase. The meaning of these figures is plain. They indicate a greater production than is obtainable with the same capital in Europe at the present time. But it is far from being equal to what was common in the first age of the colonies.

Now the economic system formed on the ruins of collective property constantly tends to become incompatible with the diminishing productivity of the soil under cultivation. The stimulus of private property increases production. But the isolation of the producer tends to impede this movement. Soon a time comes at which the system is in contradiction with the demands of social life. Either the cultivator does not produce enough for his own maintenance or, independently of this fact, there is not enough produced to support the non-agricultural class, without whose existence civil society is hardly possible. Therefore at this point arises the necessity of forming a new type of association, one resting not on the basis of collective property which limits production, but on the basis of private property. But if the diminishing productivity of the land is sufficient to bring about the necessity of a system of collective production, it is yet con

A fragment of the "Analysis of the Theory of Capital" by Prof. A. Loia, of the University of Padua, translated, with the author's permission, by W. Lloyd Bevan.