be very
sparingly used. Labor is our richest vein--"

"We may have too much of it. Take it as a fact that you now have more
than you can use, and the unemployed part is starving; what will you do
with them?"

"That is a mere temporary and casual depression, to which all classes
are liable."

"But," said Sir Charles, "which none can so ill bear. Nay--what if it is
permanent? You look to increased trade. Do you suppose we are to retain
our manufacturing pre-eminence when every country, new and old, is
competing with us? Can our trade, I ask you honestly to consider,
increase at the rate of our population? Besides, for heaven's sake, look
at the thing as a man. Grant that we have a hundred thousand men out of
work, and hundreds of thousands more dependent on them--do you think
it no small thing that the vast mass should be left for one, two, three
years seething in sorrow and distress, while they are waiting for trade!
By the time that comes they may have gone beyond the hope of rescue.
Ah! if an elastic trade comes back to-morrow, you can never make those
people what they were; ought we not to have forecast that they should
not be what they are? But I contend that depression has become chronic,
the poverty more wide-spread and persistent--how then shall we, who
represent these classes among the rest, face the prospect?"

Here interposed a gentleman high in office, a pure, keen, rigid
economist of the highest intellectual and political rank.

"My dear Sterling, pardon me if I say you are talking wildly. Perhaps
you don't see that you are verging on rank communism. The working of
economic laws can be as infallibly projected as a solar eclipse. You can
secure no class from periodic calamity, and so regulate laws of supply
and demand by guiding-wheels of legislation and taxation as to save
every man from penury. You wish us to send away our bone and sinew
because we have no present employment for it, and next year, or the
year after, under a recovered trade you will be wringing your hands and
cursing the folly that prompted you to do it."

"I should be too glad of the opportunity," replied Sir Charles,
sturdily, "but in truth there is an incubus of excessive numbers that
no revival of trade will provide for, even if it is beyond our extremest
hopes, and I for one will not be guilty of the inhumanity of keeping
fellow-creatures in misery till we can find a use for them. You have
forgotten that there are other economic