native cotton is long-stapled and less suited to the ordinary manufacture; and that, as the fellahs are too poor to buy grain, they cannot indefinitely increase the area of cotton ands. It remains to be seen whether this can be done to any very large extent without displacing the food crops.

Whether the cotton crop of Brazil can be immediately or largely increased, we have little means of knowing. Cotton has been exported from that empire since 1778; and during the last twenty years the amount has slightly increased, and a good deal is raised for home use. The Brazilian cotton plant is perennial, and grows to a height of fifteen feet. It succeeds better in the inland provinces than near the sea, as the climate is less changeable; but, from the want of proper roads, most of the produce has to be brought down to the coast, a distance sometimes of 450 miles, by pack mules. The great obstacle, however, to increased cultivation is the want of labour. It has been suggested of late that this difficulty may be removed by the employment of Indians; but as they have very few wants which the forest cannot satisfy, and none which they cannot supply by gathering vanilla or india-rubber and taking it for sale to the nearest village, it is more than doubtful whether they will submit to be thus utilised. The same objection applies to the West-India Islands and to British Guiana. We are told that there are 1,000,000 acres of land in Jamaica fit for cotton-growing, and 100,000 persons out of employ. Inasmuch, however, as this unoccupied class has contrived to exist, ever since the emancipation of the Negroes, without any profit to other people, but with perfect satisfaction to itself, we question whether the substitution of cotton for coffee or sugar on a plantation will inspire it with any new taste for work. British Guiana has for some time back been importing Chinese labourers with unusual success; but it remains to be seen whether the planters will think the present demand for cotton a sufficient inducement to give up growing sugar, when both soil and climate offer such exceptional facilities for the cultivation of that crop.

The imports of cotton from all quarters, besides those we have enumerated, amounted in 1860 to 8,667,978 lbs. For this increase, we are mainly indebted to the labours of the Manchester Cotton Supply Association. But none of the countries included under this general designation are in a position to send us an immediate supply. A good deal has been said of late about Africa; but with the exception of Natal, the cotton districts of that continent are exposed to all the risks and vicissitudes incident to barbarous society; and Dr. Livingstone's glowing pictures of native cultivation have probably more interest for the philanthropist than the capitalist.

Natal has higher claims upon our notice. Its situation, soil, and temperature, are described as being admirably fitted for the cotton plant; but, as a young and scantily peopled country, it has neither the labour necessary to develop its resources, nor the capital wherewith to supply the deficiency. Queensland, with even greater advantages, suffers from a similar want. The climate seems to suggest the introduction of two different systems of cultivation :-in the temperate districts, small farms, resembling the German plantations in Texas, worked by European colonists, with their families; and, in the tropical districts, large plantations, worked by Asiatic labour. The former class of emigrants, Queensland, under the guidance of its energetic Governor, Sir George Bowen, is making very vigorous efforts to attract to its shores. Persons who are able to pay their own passage-money are entitled, on their arrival, to receive land-orders, in the proportion of eighteen acres for each adult whom they bring with them, and twelve acres more after they have been two years in the colony. Two children, over four and under fourteen years of age, count as one adult; so that a man and his wife with four young children will start with a free grant of seventy-two acres, to be increased in two years' time to one hundred and twenty. By taking additional labourers at their own expense they may enlarge their farms, in the same proportion. With a view to encourage larger plantations, grants are also made of not less than 320 acres, or more than 1,280, at a deposit of 2s. per acre. If within two years one-tenth of the land is planted with cotton, and a sum of money equal to 2,500l. for every 320 acres has been laid out on clearing and improvements, the deposit will be returned, and the land granted in fee. If no evidence can be shown of these conditions having been complied with, the deposit will be forfeited, and the land, with any improvements which may have been made on it, will revert to the government. The importation of coolies seems to be less unpopular in Queensland than was expected; and a bill to legalise it was passed last summer by a large majority of the House of Assembly. Chinese immigrants appear to incur the same dislike which, whether deservedly or undeservedly, is felt for them in other parts of Australia. If these measures have their anticipated effect, there seems great reason to believe that Queensland may rival the Southern States of America as a cotton-growing country. The climate is favourable. Warm rains come early in the season, and from April onwards there is an uninterrupted continuance of fine weather for picking, during six or eight months. The constituents of the soil are not yet so well known; but the undiminished verdure of the natural grasses throughout the dry season points to that

capacity for retaining moisture which we have seen to be the most essential requisite for the growth of cotton. The cost of interior transport will be small, as in almost all cases the plantations will be along the seacoast, or on the banks of navigable rivers. Hitherto only Sea-Island cotton has been cultivated in the colony; but, as that has yielded more than double as much to the acre as it does in South Carolina or Georgia, there is reason to expect that the average produce of the short-stapled variety, which is about to be tried, will be proportionately large. The quality of the fibre is said by Mr. Bazley to be equal, and in some instances superior, to any thing ever seen in England.

The results of this survey are not very encouraging. No country besides America seems to possess all the requisites for the immediate production of the best material on a sufficiently large scale. India has the labour which is required, but her material seems to be hopelessly inferior. Australia possesses the material, but has still to create the labour. Egypt and Brazil have both material and labour, but it is not clear to what extent their exports admit of being increased. On the whole, however, Australia is the quarter from which there seems to be most hope; and the Cotton Supply Association and the Manchester Cotton Company would probably be better employed in coöperating with the Australian governments to organise a system both of white and coolie emigration than in attending exclusively to India. Artificial encouragements and a revived system of protection may certainly do much to increase the Indian cotton crop, as well as to divert into the English market a portion of what is now exported to China or retained for home consumption; but we cannot forget, as Mr. Bright does, that the Indian authorities have other duties than that of keeping Lancashire employed. If, under the impulse of an exceptional remission of taxation, cotton crops were to be generally substituted for grain throughout India, from what quarter is the food of the population to be derived? In a country destitute of any adequate means of transit, food does not readily find its way from one district to another, still less from the seacoast to the interior, and over-abundance may be effectually separated from scarcity by the intervention of an inaccessible mountain or a few miles of pathless jungle. Even supposing the danger of famine averted, we have seen that the demand for the indigenous cotton of India must, to all appearance, cease in a few years. And it is an Indian, as well as an English question, whether the benefit of increased exports for a time would not be too dearly purchased at the cost of a glutted market, an unsaleable crop, and a disappointed people.

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN IRELAND.

NOWHERE does the difference in principle between English freedom and Continental liberalism appear in sharper outline than in questions connected with national education.

Abroad, the revolutionary party seek to absorb all power into the central authority. They insist that it is the prerogative of the state, or rather of the minister who, in matters of public instruction, represents the dominant party in their chambers, to direct the education of the people. In his hands they place the appointment of schoolmasters and professors; he determines how much or how little of religion should be taught in schools and colleges, and so seeks to control and to form the mind of the rising generation. Thus, democratic absolutism is no less absolute than monarchical absolutism, and not only asserts its dominion over the body, but claims a right to guide the conscience and to mould opinion.

With us, on the contrary, government interference in education is jealously limited. Disliking all monopoly, we hold with Bastiat that the most odious of all monopolies is the monopoly of education. We believe that state education would be intellectually inferior to that given in our various free universities and schools, whose honourable competition with one another preserves a high standard in all. We love liberty too much to allow the government to give a direction to opinion. It is our boast that among us government is itself the result and the expression, not the creator, of public opinion.

But, above all, it is our deep and unwavering conviction that the central political authority is powerless to mould the mind and the heart. True moral training can be given only by family or religious influences; and for the youth in our public schools, away from their homes, we deem the presence of a strong religious influence essential to the protection of their faith, and the development of their moral being. Our love of liberty, and our religious spirit, both combine therefore to make us almost unanimous in favour of the most complete liberty of education, and any infringement of that liberty we should resist, and have resisted, as an odious and un-English tyranny.

We are deeply persuaded of the truth of these principles ; we approve of their practical working as satisfactory; and yet, with strange inconsistency, we limit their operation to our own island, and force upon our reluctant fellow subjects on the other side of the water a system which, for ourselves, we repudiate and anathematise. It is to a remarkable manifestation

of this inconsistency that we propose now to call attention: we approach it in no party or sectarian spirit; we have always maintained, in their largest sense, the principles of religious liberty; we desire that those principles should be carried out in as conscientious a spirit where Catholics are strong, as where Catholics are weak-where they form a majority, as well as where they are few. Therefore we consider that the statement we are about to make, and the appeal we shall found upon it, have some claim on the attention of those among our readers who, differing from us in religious belief, desire, as we do, to extend as widely as possible the domain of freedom. Grave political and social interests are at stake: it is our geographical morality, our double weights and measures, our loud profession of principles here, our refusal to admit them or to act upon them outside our own island, that have alienated from us the hearts of our Irish fellow subjects. No Englishman will admit that French institutions are better than those we enjoy; and yet, in a century and a half, German-speaking Alsace, the same in race with the Germans inhabiting the opposite side of the Rhine, has become united in heart and affection to the rest of France. The inhabitants of Alsace are as entirely French in spirit as the inhabitants of Touraine or Nivernais; while six hundred years of connection have left the Irish people as distinct from, not to say as hostile in feeling to, England as the Belgians were to Holland in 1830. Why? Because the French government has governed Alsace upon the same principles, and in the same spirit, as the rest of France. It has applied to both the same system of administration; it makes no religious distinction between different portions of the population; it does not speak, or think, or act, as if any portion of its subjects were aliens; and the natural result has been complete unity of feeling and entire political consolidation. Our government of Ireland has been, and still is, founded on totally opposite principles. Messages of peace we send there when it is our interest to do so. Equal justice, religious or educational equality, we have denied, and still continue to deny, to the Irish people: we seem to forget in our dealings with them, that it is harder for a nation to bear a partial injustice than to submit to a tyranny which is equal for all. In one word, our policy in Ireland is a policy not founded on principle, but on a supposed expediency. We seek there not truth and justice, but the maintenance of the English interest; and that English interest is considered to consist in weakening, as far as we can, the hold which the Catholic religion has on the minds of the Irish people.

Neither the failures of three hundred years, nor the ab