art of the Italian
population. What ruined the agriculturists, who used to feed the
remaining forty-nine fiftieths? The unlimited importation of cheap grain
from Spain, Egypt, Sicily, and Lybia, and nothing else.

2. In the next place, even if the gratuitous distributions of grain had
embraced twenty times the number which they did, nothing can be clearer
than that the effect _on agriculture_ is the same, whether cheap foreign
grain is imported by the private importer, or bought and distributed by
the government. If the home-grower _loses his market_, it is the same
thing to him whether he does so from the effects of private importation
or public distribution; whether his formidable competitor is the
merchant, who brings the Lybian grain to the Tiber; or the government,
which exacts it as a tribute from Sicily or Egypt. The difference is
very great to the _urban_ population, whether they receive their foreign
grain in return for their own labour, or get it doled out to them from
the government store as the price of keeping quiet. But to the _rural_
cultivator it is immaterial, whether destruction comes upon him in the
one way or the other. It is the _importation of foreign grain_ which
ruins him; and the effect is the same, whether the price paid for is the
gold of the capitalist, or the blood of the legions.

ELINOR TRAVIS.

A TALE IN THREE CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

It is now forty years since I found myself, for the first time in my
life, in the once fashionable city of Bath. I had accompanied thither
from London a dear friend from whom I had parted two years before at
Oxford; a man as noble as ingenuous, as gentle as he was brave. Few men
could boast the advantages enjoyed by Rupert Sinclair. Born of noble
blood, of a family whose peerage had been raised upon the foundation of
a huge wealth, handsome in person, intellectual, well-informed,
enthusiastic and aspiring, he bred a fascination around his existence
which it was difficult to resist. I had already graduated when Rupert
Sinclair entered Christ Church as a gentleman commoner; I was, moreover,
his senior by five years, yet from the moment I saw him until the hour
of his decease--with one painful interregnum--we were firm and
unflinching friends. He was sent to the university, like others of his
rank, to acquire such knowledge of men and books as a temporary
residence--and that alone--in an atmosphere of mingled learning and
frivolity, is gener