racterise the civilisation of any people. Moreover, most of these instances, which are studiously paraded to the discredit of the people of the United States, have not in any respect the character attributed to them. If a party of emigrants are crossing the plains, with their caravan of waggons and cattle, a thousand miles from officers and courts, and one of them murders another in cold blood, it is not an instance of "lynch law," if the caravan is arrested, a judge appointed, a jury empanneled, the criminal tried, condemned, and put to death. A party of Frenchmen crossing the desert of Sahara, a colony of Germans in Siberia, or of Englishmen in Australia, would do the same. The "Vigilance Committee" of San Francisco, in 1851, had no characteristics of a mob. We had imported into that remote state the mild laws of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, which were suited only to old and thicklysettled countries. But we found in our midst the thieves, burglars, and murderers of London, Paris, New York, and Philadelphia, and the escaped convicts of Australia, often organised in large and formidable bands. The police force was small, and in part corrupt. The laws themselves were insufficient-not sufficiently repressive. It was not an exercise of mob law when the citizens rose en masse, and seized a criminal who had not only committed murder himself, but was standing quiet while an innocent man, who, from his resemblance to him, had been convicted of that same murder, was about to be hanged for it. They acted slowly and dispassionately, and after trying the criminal, and keeping him in confinement for several days, deliberately hanged him at noon in the public streets. This was not the act of a mob like that which hanged Captain Porteous at Edinburgh, or the other mob which ravaged London some years later. It was the deliberate, as well as instinctive act of a people of British origin, rising to vindicate, and not overturn, the law; to cause terror to the brigands, and put them to flight.

THE RIGHTS Of Labour.

Capital is one of the great promoters of industry, for it furnishes the raw material and the wages for industrial enterprises. It constructs great public works which without its aid could never succeed. Private capital, unaided by government, is sometimes incapable of such immense enterprises as the Sucz Canal, the Mont Cenis Subterranean Railway, and the Interoceanic Pacific Railway; yet, in and of itself, it is a great and beneficial power in the world. But, like all other powers, if unchecked, capital becomes a tyranny. The proposition that competition will regulate the relations of labour and capital, was long accepted in theory, but in practice has proved to be wholly deceptive. It therefore requires other checks from public opinion and from legislation, as a protection of the productive classes.

In the United States we have first followed, and then outstripped the British Parliament on the subject of the rights of labour. More than fifty years ago, the English cotton man facturers found that the demand for labour was so great, that children were employed in the cotton factories at so early an age, and for so many hours in each day, that they had no childhood or youth, and were, moreover, subjected to the most de moralising influences. These capitalists demanded, to their own imperishable honour, laws to protect these poor children; but demanded them for a long time in vain, until they finally rallied Public Opinion to their support, when they succeeded in their benevolent purpose. Many years later, the operatives of Great Britain felt themselves aggrieved by what they considered the oppressive demands of capital, and attempted to form organised associations for self-protection. But the laws declared such associations illegal. The British Parliament enacted a law which removed this disability. This law was not enacted because the operatives had a party in Parliament to enforce their claims, for no such party existed. It was only because they appealed to Public Opinion, to the moral sense of the British public, that

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they obtained the rights which they demanded. Even then it was said, that this conceded right of voluntary association would be fruitless, because if labour organised itself for selfprotection against capital, then capital would organise itself for self-protection against the exorbitant demands of labour. But this result is precisely what is desirable. When these two forces, both organised, meet face to face, they are then in a position to act as contracting parties, and to make treaties which shall protect the rights of each, instead of wasting their forces in a guerilla warfare upon each other.

In the United States we have gone even further. Public Opinion has there recognised it as a truth, that men were not sent into the world merely to work, eat, sleep, and die, as the brutes do, but to enjoy life measurably; that any operative or handicraftsman who labours industriously eight hours a day, is entitled to the other sixteen for the purpose of refreshment, recreation, social enjoyment, and self-culture. This Public Opinion has culminated in enactments of Congress and of many of the States, providing that, in the absence of a written agreement to the contrary, eight hours' daily labour shall be considered a day's work. It is true that the contracting parties may still make a different agreement, but they are not likely to do so in the presence of a public opinion which has received such an emphatic expression. Under the influence of these movements, the wages of labour have gradually risen in those portions of the world where capital is the most active, subject to some disturbances from the competition of nations with each other, which must in time regulate themselves. This recognition of the rights of labour must prevail in all civilised countries, for it ought to prevail. It is not the preaching of a new gospel. It is as old as the text: "The poor you have with you alway." The Moravian peasant, who starves with his wife and children in his hovel of a single room, upon wages of ten cents (five pence, or eleven sous) a day, is one of Christ's poor. And between his degradation, and that point of elevation where life becomes a means of enjoyment to intelligent and cultivated social beings, there is no resting-place. The recognition of the rights of labour is the fundamental principle of the movement now in pro

gress for the relief of Ireland. And the same principle, it would seem, demands that Chinese and other barbarian operatives should be excluded from civilised countries. For when such transient immigrants come into a country, letting themselves out to service for wages which are graduated by a scale of their own country, where capital and a redundant population have reduced the operative to the condition of a serf, then the civilised operative is subjected to a new contest with capital, in which he is wholly unprotected, and which must end in degrading him to the level of his barbarian competitor. Much sentimentalism has been wasted upon this subject, but the measure and effect of this kind of competition can be easily demonstrated by a comparison of the wages demanded by the two classes of operatives, the civilised and the barbarian (1).

(') As a part of this sentimentalism, may be classed a hope often expressed that the contact of the Chinese with Christian nations might be the means of christianizing them. But those who have not come into actual contact with them cannot cenceive the ineffable disdain with which even the lowest Chinaman looks down upon all outside barbarians. Without mathematical science suflicient to construct an almanack (see M. Huc), or engineering skill competent to work a steam-engine with safety, the Chinese look upon European science and skill as we do upon the jugglery of an Indian Fakir. Besides, these tran. sient immigrants are of the very lowest order in their own country, the veriest Pariahs of the population, and if they were all converted to Christianity could make no appreciable impression upon their countrymen.

PART II.

THE "ALABAMA" TREATY.

COMMENCEMENT OF THE CIVIL WAR.

On April 12th, 1861, the civil war commenced in America, by the firing upon Fort Sumter. On April 19th, 1861, President Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring the ports of the seven states in which the insurrection had broken out to be in a state of blockade. On May 14th, 1861, the British Government issued a proclamation recognising the Confederate States as belligerents, and requiring its subjects to observe neutrality between the parties at war.

THE "ALABAMA."

On June 23rd, 1862, Mr. Adams, Minister of the United States at the Court of Great Britain, writes to Earl Russell that a war steamer had been launched in the Mersey, and was fitting out for the Confederate service. Earl Russell replies, June 25th and July 4th, that the matter has been referred to the proper department of the Government, and suggests to Mr. Adams that all the evidence he has respecting the destination of the vessel be submitted to the collector of customs at Liverpool. The