THE RACING IN OCTOBE R.

BY CRAVEN.

“ How say you now? This space is wide enough.
Look forth : you cannot see the end of it."

SHELLEY'S SCENES FROM "FAUST."

Good counsel is a didactic drug. People blow upon it, forasmuch as it is offered under ungracious conditions-namely, that it is of no use to the owner. Now which of us would turn up his nose at a legacy of £100,000, upon the grounds that the bequest was worthless, seeing that the defunct could have no further need of it?...

From the earliest stages of the human communion, the few have thought for the many. These thinkers had high honours : some were accounted sages, some were pronounced philosophers, some were declared to be prophets... Without disparagement to others, all these latter may not have been inspired. They who systematically watch are more likely to detect the approach of the shadows of coming events than those whose circumstances forbid the exercise of such ward and observation. The celebrated Lord Chesterfield—who, not to say it profanely, cannot be associated with the currently-accepted prophetshaving occasion (and perception to profit by it), for noting that game of desperate hazard, those throws (throes) of legitimacy's forlorn hope, which hurled the Bourbon for ever from the throne of his inheritance, and broke his sceptre like a rotten reed, writ thus, years before the fact was accomplished whose advent he foretold : “ The despotic government of France is screwed up to the highest pitch : a revolution is fast approaching that, I am convinced, will be radical and sanguinary." Cause and effect are as inseparable in morals as in mathematics. Thus the social world, when there is nothing to stir it-moral or materialstands still, albeit in yearning for the fulfilment of the fundamental law of nature-action. Leaving, however, all speculative references to this instinct of human and animal life—this impulse of all existence-let us examine the principle practically, in relation to its present and direct influence upon the popular position and prospects of the country. That such is germane to the purpose of my theme, light and evanescent as are its incidents, will transpire in the sequel.

We need not look much farther back than a hundred years to arrive at a date in the annals of Europe when that quarter of our planet represented the civilization of “ the great globe itself.” Little more than a century ago, the flags of Asia, Africa, and America were all but unknown to our ports ; and essays at intercourse with nations beyond the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were looked upon as pilgrimages of daring discovery omassages of wild adventure. Pekin and Timbuctoo were fabulous cogitals, such as Mr. Lemuel Gulliver visited in bis travels; and the Dr. Samuel Johnson to the Hebrides elicited more tiptoe interest and surprise than do modern voyages to the poles of the earth, or rides on ponies among the stars. That was yesterday : to-day, New York is more easy of access from London than was Dublin or Edinburgh when the writer of this retrospect was born. What will it be tomorrow? The last six years have done more to extend man's sphere of action, in all its relations, than the sixty centuries that preceded them, Space has become mere matter of taste and cost. You need not lose a minute between the Carlton and the Bedford at Brighton, unless you prefer it. Take your morning's letters, the Times newspaper, and your seat in an express train-and there you are. Time, chronometrically considered, must be absolutely annihilated, between the Greenwich Observatory and the electric telegraph. It will presently be necessary to accommodate the tense to the geometrical situation, otherwise you will fail to make yourself understood. According to Greenwich, it will be the day after to-morrow in one part of the kingdom, when it is the day before yesterday in another ; while by the wires it may be made noon all over the universe at the same instant.

These are strange things, and this is the age of such. A change has come o'er the spirit of our dream. That we have already com. menced one of the most remarkable social revolutions this land has ever passed through, is as sure as that “ there is a Providence doth shape our ends." The day has dawned when class theories of political economy must yield place to one general principle of popular philosophy. The occasion is at hand which shall interpret the legitimate moral of life's earthly mission,

“ And vindicate the ways of God to man.” Plato and Bacon were suns of brilliant systems of human policy, of the recondite regions of knowledge and wisdom, but, withal, out of the reach of household application. The world was too poor and too busy for meditation. It wanted the plain writing and the perspicuous reasoning which all who run may read. It was not ignorant-it was not “ base and brutal” for lack of disposition to be taught, but from want of leisure to learn. A man born to nothing in England in the 19th century is by such nativity made heir to a debt, the like of which never lay upon the industry and endurance of any people since the Flood. He is to all practical intents and purposes as effectually a slave as if he had been born into captivity. Without money, he has no more chance of passing the barrier of sea by which he is encompassed, than one chained to the earth by fetters beyond his strength would have of going whither he might wish. His only chance is to stay where he is, and starve as little as he can. An English labourer's wages, in the majority of the rural counties, in the middle of the present century, may be assumed at eight shillings a week, and that a liberal average for the agricultural labourer—the staple of their population. With two shillings of that, at least, for his rent, a wife, and the very lowest allowance of children, what possibility is there for him to set about his education ? ---to read or to write--if he knows how ?-but it is 100 to 1 he can neither do the one nor the other. Here is a beau ideal of a free citizen of Old England! Capital has him as fast at its feet as ever Hail Columbia held nigger slaves. It is true, Midas does not strip him quite to the skin, nor absolutely famish him outright; but then speculation

has ascertained that a man is worth more alive than dead. That is to say, when it takes the trouble to calculate the Dr. and Cr. account. Ireland would not bother itself on the subject ; so it let its farms for £5 the acre, and paid the cultivator fourpence a day-and so Green Erin is in a fair way to return to the pastoral picturesque from whence she derived her title.

Thus stands the dilemma in reference to the ignorant--and how is it with those who can read, mark, and learn? For them is The Book, wherein is recorded the commandment and the law of THE ETERNAL. In it little heed is had to the fashion of a priest's robes, or the manner of his mien. But there it is declared " Of him to whom much is given much shall be required.”..... Lords and ladies of half-a-dozen palaces a-piece, there are beings like yourselves—born to immortality --shaped after the same Creator's image, in this city of the Earth's civilization, lodged comparatively worse than your dogs. Nobles! millionaires! with wealth which not the thousand appliances of luxury and wassail can enable you to waste, here in London are multitudes of your fellow-creatures keeping the other foot out of the grave upon offal which you would not put before your pigs. You know it well : your newspaper deposits practical instances fresh every morning on your breakfast tables.

Was the parable of Dives and Lazarus written with no design to a moral?

" The accident of birth commands what merit cannot hope to obtain, and what makes this malversation of sacred funds the more shocking is that they are diverted from the service of the Church to swell the lands or to support the extravagance of their useless possessors." So spake the Times a couple of weeks ago, apropos of the brothers Prettyman, a brace of boon parsons-Siamese sinecurists—who, following the example of an eminent Lord at patriotic economy,“ do what they please with their own." Summing up this category, the journalist comments : ** Yet while we are in the habit of exacting from men of talent and experience the most laborious duties for paltry and inadequate salaries, we suffer hundreds of thousands of the public money to be swallowed annually by drones who cannot even give a specious account, when called upon to explain the services which they render.” Suffer, quotha ! how are we to help ourselves?

Bill Sykes “ spouts' a pinchbeck“ ticker” for a gold one, and gets “ lagged" for seven years. A respectable merchant of the city of London, on his own showing, for a series of years is in the practice of dealing in wines of Italy and Sicily. Of the latter, a species called Benecarlo he as regularly supplies to another respectable wholesale dealer, who re-ships it to Jersey, whence he re-imports it back again, and sells it as port, at a profit of about a hundred per cent. Nobody has been about that to the Old Bailey. Certainly not. Everything in this great commercial community has its price. You knock a man down for forty shillings : you may knock his teeth down his throat and jump upon his intestines for sixty shillings more-say £5 for the lot. If he's a poor man: (subauditur)......

Contemporary-to the best of my recollection—with the Benicarlo dodge, the “Thunderer" had a leader upon the chemins de fer....... “ The plain truth is that our whole railway system has now reached

such a pitch of misnianagement that its operation is intolerable. Directors keep no faith with the public whatever. They push up their fares and diminish their accommodation with the most perfect unconcern."... How far does this description of railway“ management apply to "accommodation" provided for the Court when it goes to Osborne, or to the trains purveyed for the Privy Council on such occasions as call it to Windsor Castle ? Monopoly-as discount for its privileges—skims the cream of progress ; caters manna and fatness for the “twice two thousand that the world was made for," and leaves popular prejudice to grin and bear it...as long as it will. When will the lease expire ?

There is a fifth quarter of the world in the market-introduced under circumstances that would have flabbergasted the muse of George Robins.... ...“ Two thousand millions of land, tithe free ! no rates of any kind ! no assessed taxes ! exempt from customs and excise duties! and abounding with gold, both in dust and nuggets! Sixpence an acre-or the fee simple, if preferred, for nothing. Would not that seem to affect the current value of monopoly? and the price of capital as a social sine qua non ?

Has Mrs. Caudle hatched the British race now extant? or are Englishmen still the same in spirit and in purpose as the high hearts who carried the cross to Palestine ? and the Book of Life to lands on which the true light had never risen?...... “What's in a name?”_Country or colony ?-the fact at issue is home. There, where those we love are around us, where life is not a battle for existence, but a passage of peace and moral progress from a temporal to an eternal world ; where human nature may claim its natural rights—food and fair shelter for the body, leisure and occasion for the cultivation of the mind and the care of the soul-there-"Indus or the Pole”- there is—or should be- our HOME. And, fulfilling the ever-benignant design of Providence, the hopeful assurance that “out of evil cometh good,” it was for the middle of the nineteenth century to put a people of the West, when their necessity was sore, in possession of so gracious a boon....... “The majority of the present generation,” says one who lately treated the subject, “may easily remember the great Land of the South as containing but one or two penal settlements—as a remote region of desert, unfriendly soil, difficult of access, affording no inducement to settlers, and tempting none but the most wretched to visit its shores. It was, in fact, at no further date than thirty years since a place of crime, of chains and stripes, a vast jail in a wilderness, a criminal lazar-house at the antipodes, a voyage to which was as much dreaded as would have been a trip to Siberia or Russian Tartary. The same generation that remember all this, now regard that country, and justly so, as a land flowing with something better than milk and honey-a region rich beyond exaggeration in gold, copper, and timber; prolific to profusion in its yield of corn, wool, wine, and oil; teeming with safe and commodious harbours for shipping, with endless regions of the richest grass-lands and fertile grainsoils, with vast forests of valuable woods sufficient to supply all the world with shipping for the next dozen centuries-and, above all this, blessed with a climate so admirably adapted to the human frame that in most parts of the country the profession of a medical man is a poor and unneeded one.”

This pleasaunce to our house of bondage, this new land of promise is