land, of any quality, under a similar system, in this or in any other country, would be precisely equal, if we do not suppose that a Flemish peasant can subsist upon a smaller quantity of food, while executing a given quantity of labour, than an English one. Under the arrangement which has been made in these colonies, the market value of the produce is not an object of the slightest importance, except as to the small surplus which they raise beyond their own consumption. By the exertion of their own muscular strength,-by the use of their own fingers, these colonists erect their own dwellings, fabricate their own clothing, as well as the necessary furniture for their households, and raise the whole supply of corn, milk, butter, and cheese, which is wanted for their family consumption.

It seems to us to admit of no question, that the experiment, which has answered in every respect in the Netherlands, would, if fairly put to the test on any of our thousand and one wastes, succeed equally here. Every undertaking must have a beginning; and we earnestly call upon the wealthier inhabitants of some particular district, or even county, to combine their efforts. In many parts of the country, manufacturing workhouses already exist, for the reception of paupers belonging to several parishes. These institutions are annually attended with a vast expense. The value of the manufacturing labour executed in them seldom bears the proportion of one to a thousand, when compared with the cost of maintaining them. They are moral pest-houses, for the encouragement of idleness and profligacy, where, at a great charge to the public, a host of outcasts are reared and trained for a career of misery. For these costly and demoralizing establishments, which the English poor dread even more than imprisonment or transportation-for

That pauper-palace which they hate to see,'

we would fain see substituted a district or county colony, where every able-bodied human being out of employment might find both work and subsistence. If such an experiment were set on foot in any part of England, and conducted with a due attention to its necessary details, its success would, we think, be certain. It must, however, be added, that without a rigid adherence to these details, any attempt of the kind would run great risk of miscarrying. This observation is of importance, not only with reference to what we hope to see tried, and that speedily, here in England, but also on account of an experiment of this kind about to be set on foot in the sister island. From the regulations which have been laid down for the foundation of these Irish colonies, we are inclined to suspect that the cardinal feature of the Dutch system of colonization has been overlooked. Our neighbours seem to think that-given ten acres of land, eight colonists, and an amount of capital adequate to sustain

sustain them until the first harvest-the result must be an abundant and never-failing subsistence for the settlers. It is very true, that the Flemish association has land, and capital, and colonists, but it has something more: something without which all these ingredients would prove utterly unavailing; it has a well-organized plan of cultivation, and an efficient system of superintendence and control, which ensures the due execution of this plan, in defiance of any want of skill or want of will among the colonists. This constitutes, in fact, the essence of the scheme which has succeeded. The Irish association seem to imagine, that by increasing the allotments from seven to ten acres, the necessity of rigidly superintending the labours of the colonists will be obviated; but in this expectation they will find themselves wofully mistaken. Without a careful supervision, their settlers-Irish settlers!—will be found too deficient, both in skill and in industry, to draw a subsistence from three times ten acres of land. This was, in truth, the only point with regard to which any difficulty was experienced in the establishment of the Dutch colonies: there was no difficulty in raising capital, in purchasing land, or in obtaining colonists; but it was not without considerable exertion that they found or prepared a sufficient number of managers and directors-competent to superintend and enforce the due execution of the scheme in its practical details. They felt that no increase in the size of the allotments, no addition to the amount of capital, would counterpoise a deficiency in this respect. Experience soon taught them that seven acres of land were as much as a family, consisting of from six to eight persons of various ages, could cultivate with effect, and that any addition to this extent would rather diminish than augment the general produce; seven acres well cultivated by the spade, and thoroughly saturated with manure, were found to yield a much larger return of produce for a given quantity of labour, than three times seven acres imperfectly tilled.

We are by no means called upon to show that this system of tilling land solely by manual labour would answer the purposes of the landed proprietor, or great farmer, who studies to extract from his land as great a surplus as he can beyond the amount of the food consumed by the men and the animals employed in its cultivation. But even with regard to this point, we are inclined to suspect that very gross and injurious errors prevail among us; we are not quite sure that we should find an insuperable difficulty in showing, that there is scarcely an acre of land throughout many of the finest counties in England, which would not, under the system of tillage pursued in the Flemish colonies, admit of ten times the quantity of manual labour now bestowed upon it, and at the same time yield an increased rent to the owner, as well as increased profits to the occupier. This, however, is a matter

I

with

with which we shall not now attempt to deal; it is wide of our present object, which is merely to show that a portion of the unproductive territory of Great Britain might, under proper management, be so cultivated as to yield employment and subsistence to the distressed and increasing multitude of unemployed labourers who press so heavily upon the resources of the country.

It will, perhaps, be said that, upon our own showing, a considerable outlay of capital will be required in the first instance; it will be necessary to provide the means of maintaining the colonists while tilling the ground during at least one year and it may be urged, probably, as an additional objection, that this amount of capital must be withdrawn from the general capital of the country; and that the gain of one spot will be counterbalanced by an equivalent loss in another district. This seems, at the first blush of the matter, to be a formidable objection; but when closely analysed, it will, we apprehend, entirely vanish. The question is, not whether it may be expedient to transfer a certain capital from a branch of industry, in which it is now productive, into another department, but whether it be expedient to render productive, both to the owners and the public, a certain amount of capital which is now utterly wasted and yields no return to anybody. We speak of the enormous capital annually squandered upon the maintenance of able-bodied paupers. The food consumed by this class of persons is pure and unalloyed loss: for all the purposes of the experiment which we thus earnestly recommend, the proper appli'cation of this wasted capital would be more than sufficient; and surely the advantage to the parish, from the adoption of this system, would be immediate and palpable. Supposing even that some fifty quartern loaves, advanced to the transplanted pauper for his maintenance during the first year as an agricultural labourer might not be repaid-(in the Netherlands it is repaid, and that with interest) still this one loss would be a mere feather in the scale, when compared with the long series of annual losses sustained by the owners and occupiers of land under the present system. In the event of success, this man requires no further assistance; the crop raised by his own industry constitutes the capital, or supply of food, required to subsist him afterwards. But, if he be allowed to consume his fifty quartern loaves in idleness, there is nothing reproduced at the end of the year; and, therefore, every subsequent year, as long as he remains unemployed, it will be necessary to furnish him, from the parish stock, with an equal supply of food, to be in its turn wasted and lost. All that is required is, that those who now throw away their capital upon the unemployed labourer, should combine to lay it out in a manner which would enable the same man to raise food for himself by the sweat of his own brow.

Note

Note on a Letter' of Sir Rufane Donkin,

OUR notice of Sir Rufane Donkin's Dissertation on the Niger' has given much offence to that gentleman; and he has consequently put forth two letters, one to the Literary Gazette, and another to our Publisher, on which we must take the liberty of making a few observations. The General, in the second of these productions, uses a great deal of very coarse language, which however shall not tempt us from our propriety-for we know of old the sensitiveness of young authors upon very slight occasions; and we think we know enough of Sir Rufane to be safe in taking for granted that, at this distance of time, he could not read what he wrote in the moment of excitation, without feelings of no enviable description.

We said, for we believed, that Sir Rufane Donkin was something of a scholar, and attributed his numerous mistakes to the hurry of impatient and unpractised authorship. He rejects this view of ours with much scorn. 'His scholarship,' he says, 'will not allow him to subscribe to our critique on the word avvßaλλsro. He cannot persuade himself that it ever could mean 'conjectured' or 'supposed.' 'The preposition and the verb taken together, when translated, are con and jacio-conjicio, meaning neither more nor less than to throw together-out of which (he continues) I cannot, by any analogy, make anything like conjecture. Now, if Sir Rufane Donkin had conjugated his verb as he used to do at Westminster-conjicio-conjeci -conjectum, we apprehend he might have arrived at something like an analogy; or, if he had explored beyond the first sense of conjicere in his Ainsworth, he would have found that shrewd interpreter writing distinctly, 'to guess, to divine, to conjecture. In the same effusion he attacks our explanation of Ptolemy's error in placing the western coast of Africa 7° too far to the eastward of Ferro, because, in that case, C a number of places,' he says, 'would be transferred into the valley of the Nile.' Sir Rufane does not perceive, that whether we take the coast of Africa at 2° east of Ferro, as we know it to be, or at 9°, as assumed by Ptolemy, the distance of the Nile would be precisely the same, and he would have the very same room for all his places. It is obvious that the real gravamen of our offence is the exposure we ventured to make of these slips. We could not but see that Sir Rufane had got rusty in his grammars, and that, as to geography, he had put his skiff to sea without ballast; mistaken the south point of his compass for the west-the Cape de Verd Islands for the Canaries-and, finally, swamped in the gulf of the Syrtis-Hinc illæ lachrymæ.

These are the real points that have discomposed the General: he was annoyed on finding we could neither approve at first sight his crotchet of fixing on the quicksands of the gulf of Sidra, as the point at which the Nile of Bornou (or the Niger) enters the sea;' nor consider his book, well stuffed as it is with Greek (which he cannot construe), and importations fresh from India of Neils, Neels, and Niles, (to be had in every geographical dictionary or gazetteer,)-to say nothing of some rather oblique puffs on the Duke of Wellington-as having established the truth of his hypothesis. To explain his meaning, and to enable the reader to see it more clearly, he draws two maps, each exhibiting-at the bottom of this gulf -an inlet terminating in a cul de sac, about eighty-five geographical miles in depth, for the reception of this mysterious, invisible, subarenaceous-we really are at a loss for a name river, as Sir Rufane calls it. This inlet, though he did not invent it, but only prodigiously enlarged its longitudinal dimensions, he might have known, from looking into Beechey's book, had no existence; that, in point of fact, there is no such thing. So strange an hypothesis as was here broached, we felt ourselves called upon to prove was inadmissible. Every known fact was against it. The very nature of the desert to the southward of the Syrtis-whose general level, as deduced from the barometrical observations of Oudney and Denham, appears to be from twelve to fifteen hundred feet above the sea,-made it physically impossible that any river could flow northerly from Soudan, the sink of North Africa, towards which the general slope of the country declines; while, even supposing a river, yet undiscovered by any traveller, to exist on so unpromising a spot as the Sahara or Desert, its course would be completely barred against all access to the Syrtis, by the great chain of black basaltic mountains-known as the Soudah, or Llack mountains, and supposed to be the Mons Ater of Pliny-which, branching off from the great group of Atlas, passes Sockna

and

and Augela, and stretches even as far east as Siwah. But of all rivers, the Niger, as it is called, is one that could be the least suspected, after its course had been traced southerly as low as the ninth degree of latitude, of returning northerly some fifteen hundred miles, to fall into the Mediterranean sea; or, as Sir Rufane has it, when deriding the opinion of Mungo Park as to its southerly direction, (subsequently proved to be well founded,) first of all taking one decided course for a great many hundred miles in one direction, and then turning back towards the very point of the compass from which it had started; so as to enter the ocean by a sort of Bourgenèse process, by a course parallel to and the very reverse of its original one.' When, therefore, we found him scouting, in one instance, and adopting in another, the absur dity he has here so wittily described, and also making this same Niger to flow directly east from its source, into the Tchad, under the name of Yeou,' which any one might know from Clapperton it does not, we goodnaturedly, as we thought, ascribed these extraordinary mistakes to his strange neglect of modern discoveries. It was abundantly clear he could not have consulted them with attention; and now-de facto, from his own shewing, it turns out that it is only since the publication of our last Number, that he has looked into even Beechey as to the character of the Syrtis.

It is true he there found marshes and swamps, and all those sort of things, which he had gathered for his Dissertation from Strabo and Solinus, but they were partial and out of place. The General, however, has made the most of his mare's nest.

To understand the case clearly, it may be right to mention, that the whole circumference of the shores of the gulf of Syris is upwards of four hundred geographical miles, from Cape Mesurata on the west, to Bengazi on the east; that the first hundred miles from Mesurata consist of a flat, marshy plain, which Beechey says 'finishes at Giraff; that at about a hundred miles farther down is the bottom of the gulf; and throughout this latter space, and also the remaining two hundred miles, the shores are composed of stones, rocky cliffs, hills of sand, and firm solid ground, on which are found the remains of numerous castles and other buildings. This kind of ground neither answering the description of Sir Rufane's book, nor, of course, the purpose of his Letter, he flies off to the first hundred miles, the only portion of the shore that does; nay more, he lays claim to the whole of the gulf, as the probable reception of the Niger;' asserting that it was never in his thoughts to conduct the Niger into the bottom of the Syrtis.'

6

Now, we are sorry to say, that Sir Rufane has forgotten, while writing his letter, what he has printed in his dissertation. No man can read his book without seeing that, if he really had any distinct meaning, he did mean to conduct his Niger into the bottom of the Syrtis, and nowhere else. We must take the liberty of proving to him, that his Thoughts, and his pencil, and his pen, all pointed to the bottom of the gulf, and to that nonentity which he has there drawn on his maps. It shall not avail him to say, that we have not gone to his text, whither, in fairness, we ought to have gone, but to his map.' We did go both to his maps and his text, and we found the former, as he has truly described them, neither calculated to give accurately all the latest discoveries, nor drawn with strict geographical exactness in every part.' Erroneous, however, as, by his own confession, which was not at all necessary, they may be, he assures us in the same page, that they will exhibit the author's meaning; and that they will show the relation of places, mentioned in the text, to each other.' That the reader may see what this meaning' of Sir Rufane is, and what the relation of the course and termination of the Niger to the Syrtis, we annex a fac simile of this part of his precious map. In this map and his description of it, there is no question as to geographical exactness; none as to whether any given point is a mile or a degree misplaced as to latitude or longitude; the question simply to be answered is, towards what point or part of a certain line of coast does a certain river flow? The meaning' and the relation' are here clear enough to answer it for themselves.

6

Gulf of Sutra
ancient

Syrtis

Course of the

Niger

But