of free competition grinds down wages to a pittance that will not support existence. The poor war with one another by underbidding, and the capitalist, good easy man that he is, employs the laborer who will work for the least wages. Laborers are more abundant than employers, and the consequences are a half million die of hunger in one year in Ireland, and jails and poor-houses are the receptacles of those whom the law makes equals and enemies.

The law of nature is competition. The strong animal exterminates the weak, and man, unrestrained by government, preys upon his fellow. The end of government is to protect the feeble in mind and body from the rapacity of the vigorous; but the liberty and equality school of philosophers would do away with these govermental restrictions and reinaugurate the law of nature, or free competition. "Might makes right," and "all men are free"-free to stand on their axioms. Every candid mind must confess the cogency of this reasoning, and admit that the social theories of Pericles and Antony, of Cicero and Socrates, of Fabricus and Justinian, which afforded protection from violence, maintenance in sickness and old age, and secured employment for their offspring, to the large majority of every community, the working classes, was far superior in its results to the experiment of free competition and equality tried in a little corner of Europe for the last three hundred years. Happy would the poor Irish have been if they could have preserved life at the price of liberty, as Sismondi relates the greater part of the free citizens of Rome did, when the barbarian overran the empire; after a short time they submitted themselves as slaves to some powerful lord, having found themselves incompetent of self-preservation. Famine and the pestilence that walketh at noon-day are more formidable and ferocious foes than were the Goths and Vandals, and the Irish and European freeman attacked by them found, like the Romans, that "no one would protect them, no one would relieve them, no one would maintain them without having some lasting interest in their labor, and this interest could only be obtained by their becoming his property."

Mr. Fitzhugh's second proposition is, that the invention of the name and science of sociology in free societies, and its absence in slave societies, proves the disease of the former and the health of the latter. Sociology is a hybrid term, meaning the science of society, the first half from the Latin, the latter from the Greek. The Greeks had no idea of society existing under any other form than Polis, a city. The city was the heart of the State; and politics, political philosophy, and

political economy referred simply to the metropolitan life. The country was inhabited by serfs under overseers; the city by freemen and masters. Hence there was an intimate connexion between government and society under the Greek policy, embraced by the general term economy. In small States, where the city constituted the vitalizing power of the community, the action of society and government upon each other was reciprocal and equal. A consideration of these political theories constituted the chief employment of the philosophic minds of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The vast dependencies of the Roman republic caused a much larger meaning to be attached to the word "politics" than it had hitherto enjoyed, and at the same time introduced a new word-socieles-expressing the mutual rights and duties of the 1,200,000 men the city of Rome then contained.

Compte, the French metaphysician, was the first person to utter this term, sociology; whether the coinage is his is dubious; and although he himself is no advocate of socialism or communism, yet its speedy adoption by the socialists, and its great currency throughout Europe, proves that such a science exists there, and has its professors; which is just as conclusive a proof of social disease as the practice of medicine is a proof of the existence in man's body of all the ills that flesh is heir to. In the south we have no anti-renters, perfectionists, and few atheists; while in the north every man has some favorite social theory to promulgate; and in religion they seem equally divided into infidels and millenarians. "Christianity melting into infidelity," is the characteristic term used by an able writer, in reference to one-half of the north; and the author of the "Democracy of Christianity," speaking for the other half, longs for the descent of Christ upon earth, when the lion and the lamb shall live in harmony together, and every man shall enjoy his own vine and fig tree, which he interprets to mean a certain allotment of land. These facts, proving the decrease of free society, and the total absence of such theorists and ideas from the south, proving the healthy tone of its system, we may fairly conclude the second proposition established.

The next argument is testimony from history and statistics to the failure of free society. The fact, admitted by all, that crime and pauperism have increased, pari passu, with liberty, equality, and free competition, would seem to render unnecesary much argument on this point; and when we add that, with slavery, the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, and the Persians, and all Europe, for a thousand years, knew nothing of pauperism and beggary, but that they are the imme

diate results of the free society experiment, the reasoning, if we admit crime and pauperism to be fatal evidence against the efficacy of any system, is impregnable.

The fourth proposition of Mr. Fitzhugh is that the exodus from western Europe is a proof of the failure of free society. This emigration, which threatened at one time to leave Ireland without inhabitants, was undoubtedly occasioned by the imminent danger of starvation at home, and the hope of passing from the Egypt of bondage and want to a Canaan of gold, milk, and honey. Although our Know-nothing movement has caused the number of emigrants to decrease from 34,906 in March and April, 1854, to 5,358 in the same months of this year, and the withdrawal of so many laborers from the field has diminished the competition at home, and temporarily relieved the working classes, yet the fact that such an exodus, to prevent extermination, should be necessary, proves the inherent defects of the competitive system.

The last statement of Mr. Fitzhugh is, "the admission of all writers who have of late years treated of the subject of society in Europe." This is a question of fact, and we will summon one of Mr. F.'s witnesses to prove the universality of the admission. Blackwood, November No., 1850, says:

"No man with a human heart in his bosom, unless that heart is utterly indurated and depraved by the influence of mammon, can be indifferent to the fate of the working classes. Even if he were not urged to consider the awful social questions which daily demand our attention in this perplexing and bewildered age by the impulses of humanity, or by the call of christian duty, the lower motive of interest alone should incline him to serious reflection on a subject which involves the well-being, both temporal and eternal, of thousands of his fellow-beings, and possibly the permanence of order and tranquillity in this realm of Great Britain. Our civil history, during the last thirty years of peace, resembles nothing which the world has yet seen or which can be found in the records of civilization. The whole face of society has been altered; old employments have become obsolete, old customs have been altered or remodelled, and old institutions have undergone innovation. All this we call improvement, taking no heed the while whether such improvement has fulfilled the primary condition of contributing to and increasing the welfare and prosperity of the people. Statistical books are written to prove how enormously we have increased in wealth, and yet, side by side with their bulky tomes, you will find pamphlets containing ample and distinct evidence that hundreds of thousands of our industrious fellow-countrymen

are at this moment famishing for want of bread and lack of employment, or compelled to sell their labor for such wretched compensation that the pauper's dole is by many regarded with absolute envy. Dives and Lazarus elbow one another in the street, and our political economists select Dives as the sole type of the nation. To work is not only a duty but a privilege; but to work against hope, to toil under the absolute pressure of despair, is the most miserable lot that the imagination can conceive. It is, in fact, a virtual abrogation of that freedom which every Britton is taught to consider his birthright, but which now, however well it may sound as an abstract term, is practically, in the case of thousands, placed utterly beyond their reach. *** Here is a question presenting itself to the consideration of all thinking men-a question which concerns the welfare of hundreds of thousands a question which has been evaded by statesmen so long as they dared to do so with impunity, but which now can be no longer evaded; that question being, whether any possible means can be found for ameliorating and improving the condition of the working classes of Great Britain, by rescuing them from the cruel effects of that competition which makes each man the enemy of his fellow; which is annually driving from our shores crowds of our best and most industrious artisans, which consigns women, from absolute indigence, to infamy; dries up the most sacred springs of affection in the heart; crams the jail and the poor-house; and is eating like a fatal canker into the very heart-blood of society."

Here we conclude our critique, inadequate to the merits of our author, as we know it to be, remarking to the general reader that though we have sought to give these remarks a direct bearing upon but one object of Mr. Fitzhugh's book, yet the work itself is most varied in its topics and their treatments, and would afford an hour's most delightful reading to the dullest man in christendom.

NOTE. A Philadelphia writer, in the Charleston Mercury, speaks as follows of Mr. Fitzhugh's work:

"The aim of the writer is to prove that Fourierism, socialism, communism, or free society, (for the name is Protean,) is a most egregious failure. The scope of his argument and illustrations has necessarily drawn in the general question of slavery slavery in its most enlarged interpretation-whether white or blackand, I think, he convincingly establishes the truth that the wisest, happiest, and most cheerful form of socialism is slavery itself; that is, a community governed by one head, and where both master or director, and those whom he governs, act and react on each other by the consciousness of mutual dependence, affection, and mutual interests. He shows that in the fearful struggle that is perpetually and so anxiously agitating both capital and labor in these northern States-the struggle between rich and poor-that the first minds, both in Europe and in this country, are gravitating towards the same opinion, namely: that slavery is the best security for the lattter-that it is the true relief for pauperism, which is the growth of free society, so-called.

"Much research, strong common sense, great condensation of thought-and these clothed in language clear, nervous, and almost aphoristic-make it an instructive and agreeable book either to the learned or unlearned. Being written in brief divisions or chapters, our children can easily be taught to comprehend it, and will find in this armory weapons to defend what has been so much vilified and misrepresented. We will learn how to protect a great principle on its own merits, and not to be restricted to reason on the mere question of social necessity or expediency, as has been done hitherto-many persons admitting slavery to be an evil, thus making a gratuitous surrender of the whole cause, and then begging quarter upon pity.

"The splendor, animation, and crowded population of the northern cities, excite, bewilder, and delight southern men and their families. Compared with the calm-the easy indolence of their own communities-a painful sense of inferiority depresscs them when they go back to their own homes. The difference is as between a magnificent panoramic view and a dark still landscape, life in action and life in stagnation.

"Let them be content. This writer will do much to reconcile them to what they have, and what they really are, when he reveals to them the interior view -the miseries of pauperism-with its grim and hideous attendants, its homicides and its wife murders, its dire degradation-as shown in penitentiaries and houses of refuge, even for children-its opium eatings, its taxations, and policespies parading the streets in regiments. These last recalling what Carlyle deridingly has written of our institutions, that "they are anarchy, plus a street constable." I cannot but hope that, on some persuasion from you, our booksellers will bring the work into their collections, thus placing it within the reach of every one."

THE SOUTH AND THE UNION.

THE UNION, PAST AND PRESENT-HOW IT WORKS, AND HOW TO SAVE IT.

Agrarian societies are numerous at the north; they hold national conventions, and have organs, avowed and secret, in the newspaper press. Long leases are distrusted at the north, for there is danger that the tenants will refuse to surrender at their close. Whole counties have united in refusing to pay rents which were justly due, and the officers of the law, while in the execution of its mandates, have been deliberately murdered. And these violators of the rights of property and life, of the laws of God and man, had strength enough to elect a governor whom they could force to pardon the convicted murderers! So strong is the agrarian spirit, that so eminent a man as Mr. Webster is forced to conciliate it by proposing in solemn Senate to confiscate the public lands, by giving a quarter section to every free white male, native and foreign, who may choose to enter upon them. To meet all these dangers the free States have no security out of the Union; once left to themselves, their perils would increase ten-fold, for it is essential to the public welfare, to the laborers and the poor themselves, that government should be able to protect all the rights of property. No matter what the sufferings of the laboring class, they would be doubled and tripled by the insecurity of private rights. In England this ability in gov