Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/723

1885.] "Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;

omnis feret omnia tellus. Non rastros patietur humus, non vinea falcem : Robustus quoque jam tauris juga solvet arator."

But do the facts at all justify the philosophy? The landlords have been put down, but the people have not risen up (except in the sense which we particularise by the word "insurrection"). The removal of the incubus has not brought an awakening to vitality and health and vigour. If Ireland is to be our ensample of the benefits of landlord-baiting, let us trample upon no landlord while the world standeth; for great as may be the misery of countries where the landlord can yet oppress, a more exceeding weight of misery afflicts the isle where the landlord has ceased from troubling.

Though the land-agitation will probably not result in such a redistribution of property as its promoters intend, it will not be of

none effect, it cannot fail of evil consequences. Agriculture is already cruelly depressed by foreign competition. It wanted cherishing, not galling, in order that it might contribute its quota to the national wealth. Yet, while its difficulties are unprecedentedly great, the time is chosen for threatening and inciting to seize it by violence. This must crush out all enterprise from among landlords, who feel as if they were administering their properties with ropes round their necks. It must tend to multiply the disadvantages under which the cultivation of the soil is carried on, and seriously to reduce the resources of the whole community. We have wars and heavy taxes. When we speak with our enemies in the gate, it is with much confusion of face. Would it not be wise to stop the land-robbers, and put off the question of spoliation until some fortunate day when Great Britain may be thriving again, and may afford to occupy herself with hazardous speculation?

THE EMPLOYMENT OF CANT IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
It may be said as truly of canting as of cursing, that it will recoil on the head of him who may indulge in it. So common is the retribution, that plays, novels, anecdotes, and prints abound wherein much of the entertainment is caused by the discomfiture of persons who have stooped to the emission of cant, and whose cant has come back to shame and to afflict them. Gratiano is so delighted with the recoil of the whine about Daniel, that he says –

"I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word;"

but it makes a dreadful facer for the old usurer. Joseph Surface, too, comes in for some very scarifying thrusts, uttered originally from his own arsenal; while Pecksniff and Heep are shown us by one of our great novelists eating leeks under merciless cudgels.

Hume tells us that canting was largely practised in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the Puritans in Scotland were the chief offenders in that way. But, taken in a broad sense, cant may hardly be said to be confined to any nation or to any subject. It seems to consist in inventing or using, with regard to its subject, words and phrases, with meanings different from what they ordinarily bear, or in connections where they are not