large one, not quite unique,' but of a beautiful lustre. This spoilt the whole. Visions of a necklace such as graces the fair throat of the lovely Empress of the French floated over our sanguine mind; butas oyster after oyster was opened, and none but inferior pearls came to light, disgust, mingled with despair, succeeded to the hopeful sentiment, and an ancient and fishlike smell,' previously unnoticed, pervaded the whole tent.

About two hundred of all sizes were extracted, from the fatal large one to many not bigger than pins' heads, more of which would doubtless have been obtained had the oysters been properly washed. As it was, the result proved that it must be a profitable business; although the Indian trader, whose object it is to keep down the prices at the Government sales, walks about with a doleful visage, and if questioned as to his success declares that ruin stares him in the face.

It is not often that very large and perfect pearls are found in the oysters taken on this coast. In a large assortment-about £1800 worth-which was brought for our inspection, there was not one worth individually as much as £20. Some were very large, but dull in colour, and almost valueless in the English market. Among the 'posal,' or misshapen class, were some like pieces of stick, others were conglomerate masses of nacreous matter, while one was exactly the shape and size of the conical bullet used in a large Colt's revolver.

The largest pearl ever found at Aripo was found at the fishery that took place in March, 1860. It was perfect in lustre and sphericity, and was as large as the round bullet used in a No. 14 rifle. It is very rare, however, that any are found of even half this size.

A portion of the bank still remained untouched by the divers, when an outbreak of cholera put an abrupt end to the fishery. Ten men were carried off in one night, a warning which could not be neglected; and the Government employés and troops were at once

embarked in the little colonial steamer Pearl, and removed to Colombo.

Before this disaster occurred, £48,215 had been realized by the Government sales. Including the divers' share-another fourth-the immense sum of £60,375 must have been spent in pearls during the short space of six weeks.

The untouched portion of the bank was fished early in 1860, and the amount realized by Government was £36,650, the oysters selling at the unprecedented price of £16 per thousand. This high price is indirectly owing to the mutinies in India. An enormous amount of jewellery was 'looted' by the British soldiery, nearly the whole of which was either taken out of the country or fell into the hands of the wellaffected nobility. Now that matters have settled down, the ladies of Oude, who were the principal losers, are anxious for a fresh assortment; the demand greatly exceeds the supply, and the prices of pearls are now exactly double what they were last year.

From Aripo we proceeded homewards by the dreary coast road-an indistinct track, knee-deep in sand for several miles, through low scrubby jungle. Shade there was none, the heat was excessive, and the continuous drought had reduced the few small tanks to insignificant mud-holes. The wild beasts had all betaken themselves to a more genial region, partly driven away by the want of water, and partly by the horrible smell arising from the millions of decaying oysters at Aripo, the 'bouquet' from which extends for several miles down the coast.

At certain seasons animals of all kinds abound in this district. The road into Putlam, which in the rainy season is two feet deep in tenacious mud, was now like cast iron, and bore the impression of the feet of every animal that had passed over it in the sticky stage. Some months had elapsed since the mud had hardened, but deep round holes denoted the presence of the elephant, and the footprints of buffalo, bears, cheetahs, deer, and

ONE

ON MODERN

NE great evil of the present day, in the eyes of many who are not political economists, and of some who are, is competition. Look in what direction you may, you will, according to them, see signs of a social war. Artisan is contending with artisan for the privilege to labour, either unconsciously beating down the rate of wages, or more unconsciously expelling some unknown rival from employment. And for what? Simply that the successful competitor may eke out life, drudgingly during his days of strength, with the 'house' to look forward to at its close. Turn to the retail tradesman, especially the small dealer, and imagine his slow despair as competition reduces the extent of his sales and the amount of his profits, compelling him to encroach upon his capital that he may keep up his usual appearance,' or live at all, while a gradually growing embarrassment ever haunts him with the coming ruin of him and his. Pass on to a higher grade, and you are among the painful struggles of the professional classes, where education and a social position, with the sensitive feelings they are supposed to produce, add bitterness to failure. There is the life-long corrosion as youth passes, hopes fade, enforced celibacy threatens advancing life; while the lonely, sour, sad old age of the 'poor gentleman' looms through the vista of years. Nay, those who

COMPETITION.

once ranked among the competently wealthy suffer from the pressure, or sink under it. Many sons of old mercantile houses are striving to uphold the character of the firm' and the standing of the family, but are overborne on one side by millionaires, and met on the other by adventurers, whose attainment of credit, when every allowance is made for plausibility and impudence, is still a mystery. Such in brief outline are the most prominent features that modern English society offers to the eye of observing sensibility; a constant and too often an unsuccessful struggle among all classes for subsistence, or the maintenance of position.'

The graver observer sees greater mischiefs in the moral evils of competition. The contest of labour competing against labour is, to do it justice, often unconscious, and always unwilling. Indeed the artisans continually struggle against this effect of competition. It is frequently a leading object of strikes to find employment for those whom the actual state of things throws out of work. This kindly feeling, however, is only found among artisans. Every one for himself' is the maxim of other classes, giving rise to various evils, of which selfishness and some form of untruth are the roots. The cynic, looking at that portion of society which lives by profits, might hold that it exhibited

the counterpart of the dark and middle ages, though in a milder form. Men do not now sally out mounted and armed to plunder the wayfaring merchant, or carry off the property of their neighbours. But they openly undersell them, they slily undermine them, they covertly deprive them of their connexion' by arts perhaps not a whit more reputable than those by which a band of Highlanders, or borderers, or German freebooters, stole upon a homestead or other place where plunder might be gotten. In professional struggles, competition may take a less sordidly offensive shape. A lawyer or a medical man may not so openly attempt to deprive a professional brother of his client or patient; but indirectly and by the use of 'influence,' possibly by insinuation, he may resort to arts which are morally as bad as the tradesman's. Probably even the divine may seek his own preferment before that of his competitors, and lose sight of his means in the end so desirable for Christianity and himself. In the less formally recognised professions agencies, engineering, and the like solicitation, with its avowed practices and unavowed arts, is palpable. But in trade, competition goes beyond discreditable acts of rivalry. It leads to fraud in many directions; adulteration in articles where adulteration is possible, even to the danger of health or life; fraudulent weights and fraudulent measures, not secretly perpetrated by individuals, but openly carried on by the trade. In textures of all kinds, woollen, linen, cotton, as well as in silks and other things, an inferior article is substituted for the genuine, and made to appear like it by misapplied science. Nor does the end for which an article is designed, or the consequences that may flow from its inferiority, influence the maker or the seller. The edge of the axe turns in the hands of the solitary emigrant; the spade breaks and the pick is blunted when the engineer is driving his sap under the enemy's batteries; the soldier's and the

labourer's shoes fall to pieces, and leave their owners barefoot. It may be replied that these frauds are owing to the rage for cheapness; that people want commodities for less than they cost; but still competition is at the root of it all. The necessity of underselling a (perhaps fair-dealing) competitor by a seemingly cheaper article, originally gives rise to trick, and is increased by increasing competition. Whether we are worse than our ancestors, upon the whole, or whether one age differs from another less in its morality than its means of cheating, are questions difficult to determine. Precautions, ending in laws, would indicate that false weights and measures were rife at a very early period in England. If we might trust an obvious attack upon society, and receive the charges of Piers Plowman as literally true, false representations, false measures, and false wares were common in the reign of Edward III. The first trustworthy records we have of competition relate to the rivalry of courtiers in Tudor and Stuart times; and very shabby, base, and treacherous things were done by the competitors. As soon as the extension of wealth and trade that followed the Revolution of 1688 enabled jointstock companies to be started, they sprung up with touches of 'smartness' about them; and the genuine bubble company shortly appeared, to culminate in the South Sea business. Still, unquestionably things are daily done by us, both in trade and professions, that our grandfathers would not have tolerated, and which indeed could not have been attempted under the oldfashioned system of business etiquette.

The strict political economist will say that all this is inevitable, and arises from traceable causes. Among them are the action and reaction of improved locomotion, of advanced medical practice, and of better understood hygiene.' The application of science to practical arts, including (of late) agriculture and other sources of food and raw materials of manufactures, has

tion that has been given to the subject. In the incessant confusion of Saxon times, and the troubles which followed the Norman conquest, the species of 'competition so many are now talking of, could scarcely take place. Its existence implies some degree of peace and protection. To what extent, and among what classes, men struggled with each other for a living seven or eight hundred years ago, can only be answered conjecturally. In a very thinly peopled and tolerably fruitful country, there could be no competition among serfs, any more than there could among slaves. As long as there is vacant and fertile land, the struggle with the masters seems to be rather to increase the number of their people, than to dispose of the raw produce those people produce. According to the modern notion, there should have been no trading competition in those good old days; yet it is possible that the limitation in the number of customers, induced more rivalry among urban traders than would be generally supposed. The great fairs, moreover, in which the larger transactions took place, compelled competition, in a certain sense, by bringing traders and customers together, and narrowly contracting the time in which they could conclude their dealings. It seems likely that as severe a competition then occurred among the upper classes, as is now felt among the classes whose scions aim at the higher professions or public employ. Notwithstanding the vast confiscations of landed property that accompanied the Conquest, it may be inferred that the Norman aristocracy soon found themselves in the position their successors are said to be in now, that is, too many for the field of employment. The first crusades perhaps attracted many warriors through this cause.

We

know from family histories that Normans were in the habit of seeking fortune in a country where no Southron for centuries past would have dreamed of looking for her,

namely, Scotland. The once great house of the Scottish Lindsays, by kings protected, and to kings allied,' and which ramified into five noble branches, each powerful and historically conspicuous, was originally Norman. Within less than fifty years after the Conquest, a cadet of the house of Randolphi de Limesay (that is, Randolph of the isle of the lime-trees), a companion and reputed relation of the Conqueror, had wended his way northward, and with good acceptance. For in 1116, Walter de Lindsay appears as a magnate or greater baron, under David I., in the character of a witness or juror, engaged in an inquiry touching the see of Glasgow. And other Scottish families are Norman in their origin. Strongbow's invasion of Ireland was prompted by fortuneseeking, as much as by any chivalrous feeling to succour the distressed, or to restore a legitimate prince to his rights. In those days the professions and arts in which competition is at present so severe, were non-existent. Indeed, there were not classes of persons to supply a demand for their services; or knowledge and education to produce the professors themselves. The exceptions to this were chiefly two. Throughout the middle ages, the armourer was a most important artist, for the warrior's life depended upon his arms and armour; the architect and sculptor, then called masons, were probably ecclesiastics to a great extent; but in both cases the demand for those kinds of work seems to have equalled the supply. Of all the professions of modern times, the church alone was distinctly recognised; and there competition seems to have been as rife at an early period as it is now, if in a different way. The representations of the verse-writers and story-tellers of the middle ages must be taken cum grano, bitterly opposed as they were to churchmen; but enough remains, after all deductions, to show that competition between rival shrines, rival relics, rival orders, and rival