. 6d., and 3s. 9d. per head of population.

Obviously, the relatively greater cost of relieving the poor in Great
Britain is due to the more expensive character of the support afforded,
and to the very heavy sums paid for salaries and other establishment
charges; but it is unquestionably a damaging fact against the system of
land tenure in Norway, that the pauperism by which it is in the present
day accompanied, with a strong tendency to increase, is equalled only by
the state of things in Ireland, which certain legislators now desire to
remedy by the creation of peasant proprietors.

The relative state of matters in Great Britain and in Norway has
therefore greatly changed since Mr. Laing wrote:

'The distribution of the wealth and employment of a country
has much more to do, than the amount, with the well-being
and condition of the people. The wealth and employment of
the British nation far exceed those of any other nation; yet
in no country is so large a proportion of the inhabitants
sunk in pauperism and wretchedness.'

An increasing rate of pauperism is one of the symptoms of agricultural
distress in Norway, but the strong tide of emigration from rural and
urban districts marks with equal force the depression and congestion
from which the country is suffering in the same degree as the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Aided by improved and cheapened
means of transport, the number of emigrants from Norway ranged between
20,212 in 1880 and 22,167 in 1883, giving an average of 1.3 to 1.5 per
cent. of the total population, the contingent of the rural districts
being about 70 per cent. of the total number. As in the case of
pauperism, the corresponding rate of emigration from Ireland, namely 1.5
per cent., exhibits a remarkable similarity, and affords another
convincing proof that peasant proprietorship is no _panacea_ for rustic
indigence.

Those who have not studied the present economic condition of the yeoman
farmer and agricultural labourer in Norway, or who have not taken into
consideration the change that has come over the entire country, and the
ambition, as distinguished from previous apathy, which education and
communication with an outer world, no longer closed to them, has
awakened among the classes with which we are dealing, are inclined to
attribute a good part of this emigrating tendency to the influence and
the material assistance of those who have gone before