er to facilitate the purchase of still more land by the ex-serfs.
The Minister of Finance was authorized in 1882 to issue annually for
that purpose a sum of 500,000l. in bonds, bearing 5-1/2 per cent.
interest. But, by the 1st of January, 1886, these banks had already
advanced over three millions sterling to 785 Communes, 1576
'partnerships,' and 359 individual peasants, representing an aggregate
number of 112,765 householders. On loans for 24-1/2 years the interest
and sinking fund, payable by the borrowers, amount to 8-1/2 per cent.,
and on those for 34-1/2 years, to 7-1/2 per cent., the lands purchased
by such means remaining inalienable until the extinction of the
mortgages, except with the consent of the mortgagees, _i. e._ the banks.
The effects of this new departure in the direction of providing small
landed proprietors with State funds, will no doubt soon be apparent.

Whether, therefore, we examine the experience of a civilized, orderly,
home-ruled country like Norway, with a steady, laborious, and, we may
almost say, abstemious, population in many respects akin to our own, or
that of a State still at an immensely distant stage of social
development,--and under a very different form of Government,--the
salient results of bolstering up, by means of State loans, or of
artificially creating, equally at the cost of the State, a numerous body
of small landed proprietors, have been strikingly identical in regard to
the ultimate economic condition of the agrarian classes.

Insisting, as we do, on the strength of the facts we have adduced, that,
in old Europe, the operation of economic laws affecting land tenure,
admits of no exceptions or extenuating circumstances in favour of their
violation, it appears impossible, without presumptuous sophistry or
political dishonesty, to resist the conclusion, that the infringement of
those laws in any part of the United Kingdom could only terminate,
infallibly and speedily, in damage to the State, after ruin to the
individual.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The physical results of intermarriage with the object of
concentrating property, are very apparent in many of the older _Bonde_
families in Norway.

[6] It would not be right to allow this observation to pass without
mentioning, even at the cost of destroying so fascinating a picture of
pastoral felicity, that the hard-working dairy-maids of Norway are never
accompanied by their sweethearts to the soeters, where, except from
Saturday n