members of society: and further, at death a decent interment shall be provided for all the dwellers on the estate at the expense of the society.' Funds are procured both by subscriptions and donations. Before any one can become a member, he or she must become a candidate by payment of an entrance-fee of not less than sixpence, and a weekly subscription of one penny for six months thereafter. At the expiration of that time, if approved of by the members, the candidate is admitted on 'his paying sixpence or upwards for his card.' Donations to any extent are received, and applied to the purposes of the society, but without acquiring for the donors any privileges. When the amount of money in hand is considered sufficient to purchase ten acres of land, a purchase is made, and from among the members a certain number of 'pioneers' are chosen by ballot to go on the property and cultivate it, and support themselves by its produce. The society has already acquired the reversion of an estate in Carmarthenshire, South Wales, on which eleven persons are employed. The value on the stock on the farm was estimated in December last at £595; and during 1850, the produce, after supporting the pioneers, realised £38, 14s. One of the residents on the farm is a shoemaker, and it is intended as opportunity affords to locate other trades, so that the wants of the little community may be supplied from within itself. The experiment is one of great practical interest and importance; and those who have its management seem, apart from their perhaps justifiable enthusiasm, to be clear-headed, sensible working-men.

Besides such associations as those described, there are many others, under the title of Co-operative Stores, in various parts of the country. Their object is to supply their members with unadulterated groceries at the cheapest possible rate. The number of these stores is considerably greater than that of the associations. The following list comprises the principal establishments of the kind in London, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cheshire-districts where the co-operative idea seems to have taken deepest root in the public mind :

Into the great general questions that these industrial experiments open up it is not our province to enter here. Whatever abstract opinions may be formed or expressed regarding them, it is clear that the time has passed away when a discussion of these would be of much value. The working-classes seem resolved on trying the experiment, and it is the interest of every one to see that it be tried not only fairly but fully. We hope that the working-classes are prepared to abide by the result, and that when they find out, what we think is inevitable, that such associations as a general rule can have no permanent existence, they will acquiesce in the existing relations between labour and capital, and avail themselves as far as possible of such industrial investments as have been described in the first part of this Paper.

LORD BROUGHAM.

IN

N 1830 Henry Brougham was placed by the suffrages of the electors of Yorkshire at the head of the parliamentary representation of the United Kingdom, amidst the plaudits of the great majority of the British people. This distinguished position in William IV.'s first House of Commons was the reward of a parliamentary career extending over more than twenty years, and presumedly as frank, sincere, and unselfish, as it was unquestionably varied, brilliant, and successful. He had conquered the repugnance of the great Yorkshire constituency to being represented by a practising barrister by the sheer force of his masculine and impassioned oratory, his energetic and unquailing defence of a persecuted lady against the wiles and oppressions of a powerful and unscrupulous court and ministry; by his vehement denunciation of the tyrannies of creed, caste, colour, under whatever pretence enacted or exercised; by his iterated exposures of the law's injustice, extortion, and delay; and his untiring advocacy of the necessity, the justice, and the wisdom, of an efficient scheme of national education. The favour of the people was ratified by the monarch. A short time after the opening of the new parliament, the member for Yorkshire was created Baron Brougham and Vaux, and took his seat on the woolsack as Lord High Chancellor of England-with the exception of the members of the royal family, the first subject of the realm in eminence and dignity.

The new

A giddy elevation! upon which it is difficult for men of the firmest, the most evenly-balanced minds to stand erect and undazzled. chancellor had himself no misgivings: not a shadow of apprehension clouded for a moment the brilliancy of the prospect which lay invitingly before him. No suggestion of wise self-distrust, it was evident, from the first words he addressed to the half-amused, half-angry Peers, mingled with the natural exultation called forth by the sudden and unexpected elevation to which he had attained. 'The thing which dazzled me most,' said his lordship, speaking from the woolsack-' the thing which dazzled me most in the prospect opened to me by the acceptance of office, was not the gewgaw splendour of the place, but because it seemed to afford me - if I were honest, on which I could rely; if I were consistent, which I knew to be a matter of absolute necessity in my nature; if I were able as I was honest and consistent-a field of more extended exertions. That by which the Great Seal dazzled my eyes and induced me to quit a station which till that time I deemed No. 88,

the proudest which an Englishman could enjoy, was that it seemed to hold out to me the gratifying prospect that in serving my king I should better be able to serve my country.' These confident words were uttered on the evening of Friday the 26th November 1830. On the 15th November 1834, not quite four years afterwards, the 'Times' newspaper announced that the Whig cabinet, of which the noble and learned lord was so able and eminent a member, had been summarily, almost insultingly, turned out of office by the king; and so thoroughly had those few years of power, whether by his own fault or the people's caprice, stripped the ejected chancellor of the popularity he had before enjoyed, that his fall alone, of all the cabinet, excited neither sympathy, regret, nor indignation. And so deeply rooted has proved this disfavour, indifference, ingratitude, or whatever else it may be called, that although the dismissed ministry was not long afterwards restored to office by the House of Commons, and that the Whigs have since, with the exception of Sir Robert Peel's last great administration, continued in the enjoyment of power, Lord Brougham, with his formidable oratorical and debating talents as brilliant and effective, his all-embracing industry as unflagging, as ever, has never been invited to re-enter the cabinet; and perhaps stranger still, no general desire that he should resume his place in the royal councils has been heard from the people with whom he was once so powerful and popular! How may we account for this extraordinary change? Must we ascribe it, with Lord Brougham's thorough-going partisans, to the mean and rancorous jealousy of former colleagues, impatient of his manifest superiority—the scandalous misrepresentations of a truculent and mendacious press, and the undiscerning, unreasoning caprice of a fickle people? Or, adopting the assertions put forth by his lordship's habitual detractors, must we say that his splendid and mighty efforts to loosen the bonds of the slave, his vehement denunciation of fraud and oppression, his strenuous advocacy of extended popular rights and the diffusion of popular instruction, were all mere promptings of a restless and insatiable vanity, to gratify which he would and did sacrifice the cause of progress, and the best interests of a people whom he only looked upon as the instruments of an intolerable, self-seeking ambition, and unhesitatingly abandoned the moment his selfish purpose was achieved? A heavy charge!-one easily made; and however essentially false, not difficult to be showily supported by one-sided and garbled views and quotations of the acts and speeches of a public man who has been busily engaged in the political struggles and vicissitudes of the last forty years of change and strife!

Is not the truth rather that Lord Brougham and the more eager, impatient reformers were mutually self-deceived; that he was never half so popularly disposed, in a democratic sense, as they-misled by occasional bursts of fiery eloquence-believed him to be; and that he, if not mistaken in the direction of the tide of popular opinion, underrated its depth, constancy, and force; and in endeavouring to arrest its progress at the limits which he thought desirable, found himself tossed aside, with no other resource left but to rail at the power of a movement which he had neither desired nor anticipated, and no longer possessed strength to guide or to control? Add to this an inveterate habit of indulging in exaggerated invective, cruel and undiscriminating sarcasm, together with a few eccentric

peculiarities of manner and expression, and you have a sufficient key to Lord Brougham's public character and conduct, to the secret of his popularity and unpopularity, without the necessity of seeking for it in groundless hypotheses of personal unworthiness, and selfish disregard of party and national obligations. This at least is our impression. Whether the reader, after glancing over the following slight sketch of the noble and learned lord's literary, forensic, parliamentary, and judicial career, will arrive at the same conclusion, we cannot of course venture to predicate; but at all events we can confidently promise that it shall not be exaggerated or distorted in outline, nor falsely and delusively coloured or disguised.

Henry Lord Brougham and Vaux, although essentially the architect of his own fortunes and position, claims to be descended from a very ancient if not very distinguished family. The genealogists trace his descent from the De Burghams, an English territorial family settled in Cumberland and Westmoreland long before the Slys and others came in with the Conqueror. Where Brougham Hall now stands, Walter de Burgham in the time of Edward, Saint and Confessor, was possessed of the manor of De Burgham. In Henry II.'s reign Odard de Burgham distinguished himself from the crowd of forgotten nobodies by incurring with others a heavy fine for unworthily surrendering the castle of Appleby to the Scots. Setting, however, aside these and other dim traditions, it appears certain that one Henry Burgham or Brougham did really marry, towards the close of the seventeenth century, the fair Miss Slee, daughter of Mr Slee of Carlisle, a jovial gentleman of three hundred a year.' It is also sufficiently clear that the Broughams were high sheriffs of Cumberland in the reigns of George I. and II. This ancient stock, somewhat shorn it should seem, not of its honours but of its manors-a more tangible loss-intermarried by its representative, Henry Brougham of Scales Hall, in Cumberland, and Brougham Hall, Westmoreland, with a highly-respectable Scotch family; the said Henry having espoused, on the 22d August 1777, Eleanor, only child of the Rev. James Syme, by Mary, sister of Dr Robertson, the historian of Charles V. and America. This marriage had numerous issue, the eldest of whom was Henry, afterwards Lord Brougham and Vaux, and Lord High Chancellor. He claims also to be heir-general and representative of the ancient and noble House of Vaux. His motto, discovered by the Heralds Office to be the ancient one of his House, is 'Pro rege, lege, grege;' and his crest is a hand and arm in armour holding a luce, argent on the elbow a rose, gules. He was born in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh, on the 19th September 1779, and received his preliminary education at the High School of that city. When only fifteen years of age he entered the university. An insatiable thirst after and love of knowledge, a singular power and aptitude for acquiring it, combined with unbounded selfconfidence, appear to have characterised him from the first dawn of his discursive, ambitious, and splendid career. He was little more than sixteen when he transmitted to the Royal Society a paper describing a series of experiments in optics, and an exposition, more showy and pretentious than sound and philosophical, of the principles which govern that science. The Royal Society thought sufficiently well of the paper to print it in the 'Philosophical Transactions' of 1796. They conferred the same honour in 1798 upon a dissertation he sent them on Certain Principles in Geometry.'