as well as vastest, of oceans, may be, in fact not less than in name, an epoch of Peace; and that the new and probably crowning world of human civilisation may be as much in contrast with the warring and socially jarring worlds of the Past as the narrow and stormy islandless ocean-trough of the Atlantic falls short of the broad and calm island-dotted expanse of the Pacific. There, too-strange meeting and reunion of the human Family!-the youngest and oldest of civilised peoples are coming together; and the European race, whose civilisation is as but of yesterday, and which has taken its newest form in its westward course across the New World, will come in contact with the most ancient alike of Empires and of civilisations-with the population, usages, and political system of China,--the apparently indestructible Nation and Monarchy; the one sole surviving Empire of the Primeval world, which has existed unbroken and undestroyed from the earliest times, from the dim dawn of oldest history; and to which now belongs nearly one-half of the civilised population of the globe! Drawn by the spells of Commerce, and aided by the almost magical agencies of still-improving locomotion, alike by sea and land, the many peoples and races of the Old World and

1 Mr E. A. Freeman, writing of the various races in the United States, quotes the following remark of "an acute American :"-" The Indian dies out. The Negro is very far from dying out; but if he cannot be assimilated by the White man, he, at least, imitates him. But the Chinaman does not die out; he is not assimilated; he does not imitate; he is too fully convinced of the superiority of his own ways to have the least thought of copying ours."

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the New, pushing forth from the shores of the surrounding continents, will meet and gather in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. And there, untrammelled by old influences, and amidst a region where Nature by climate and fertility makes existence peerlessly casy, human society and civilisation may assume new and higher forms, worthy of this Eden of the earth which Providence has hitherto kept in reserve, only to be reached in the latter days, after mankind has had a millennial experience of life while traversing the whole globe on their way to this lovely and long-secluded meeting - place and reunion of the Human Family.

CHAPTER XVI.

ON THE EFFECTS OF CHANGES IN THE QUANTITY AND VALUE OF MONEY.

THE suffering peoples of Europe rushed forth to new homes in new or hitherto sequestered regions of America and Australasia: all of them in eager search for employment and comfortable maintenance, while some sought also for that political freedom and repose from social troubles which were contemporaneously wanting in Europe. In these great objects of the Exodus the fugitive adventurers were wholly successful. If they did not find what some of their more ardent predecessors of the sixteenth century had expected or imagined-if they did not arrive at the long-lost terrestrial Paradise, nor stumbled upon the Golden Age of paganism still surviving as a solace for humanity in a New World,-they at least found beyond the Rocky Mountains, and also in the heart of the Southern Pacific, veritable Gold-countries-each a Chosen Land, "flowing with milk and honey," and paved with the most precious of metals. The very soil of California, and also of