the powers of the farmer. In agriculture, as
in manufactures, there can be no full
prosperity without an open labour-market. To
obtain this, it is necessary to remove the
motive for those detestable petty calculations
which are now made in every little parish when
a settler comes, who may one day be chargeable
upon its rates. Let the wants of a settler not
affect the rates of a village, or of a few farms,
not of a parish, but an entire Union, or of
more than an Union; extend the area over
which charge is made for the poor who require
help within it; and then at once the coming or
going of men in single villages or upon single
farms will cease to affect the tranquillity of
ratepayers. Over the whole area it will be
then felt that if some come, others go; there
will be little fluctuation in the yearly rates,
and nobody will think of fettering the
movements of the people. Labourers in the south
may wander northward; men of the north
corue southward; farmers may then employ the
best men they can find, unquestioned by their
neighbours. Then too the farmers, getting
the men that please them best and paying
them for what they do, may stimulate them
to put forth their energies, and teach them to
earn fifteen shillings where they now earn
ten.

Other wants and restrictions no doubt clog
the feet of labourer and farmer. Men, however,
who have been tied up with many knots must
consent, if they would break loose, to tug on
one cord at a time: or, if they would untie
themselves, to tackle the knots singly. The
hardships we have cited here, are of a shameful
kind—would not look at all well in the fair
hands of the Honorable Mrs. Ex-President
Tyler—are very wrong, and, like most wrong
things, very foolish.

THE KINGDOM OF RECONCILED IMPOSSIBILITIES.

THERE is a kingdom whose boundaries are
within the reach of every man's hand, on
whose frontiers no heavier entrance-tribute or
import-duty is exacted save that comprised in
the payment of two-score inflections of the
eyelids—or forty winks; a kingdom into which
the majority of humanity travel at least once
in every twenty-four hours; though the exact
time—the precise moment—at which that
voyage is commenced is, and never has been,
known to any man alive. Whether we are
transported by some invisible agency—on the
wings of spirits or in the arms of genii—
whether we go to the kingdom or the kingdom,
comes to us, we cannot tell. Why or how
or when we came there we know not; yet,
almost invariably, when the tribute of the
forty inflections has been duly paid, we find
ourselves wandering in the Kingdom of
Reconciled Impossibilities.

Locomotion in this kingdom is astonishingly
rapid: we run without moving and fly, without
wings. Time and space are counted zeros;
centuries are skipped at a bound; continents
and oceans are traversed without an effort.
We are here, there, and every where. Grey-
headed men, we are little boys at school,
breaking windows and dreading the
vindicatory cane. Married and settled, we are
struggling through the quickset hedges of our
first love. Crippled, we race and leap; blind,
we see. Unlearned, we discourse in strange
tongues and decipher the most intricate of
hieroglyphics. Unmusical, we play the
fiddle like Paganini. We pluck fruit from
every branch of the tree of knowledge; the
keys of every science hang in a careless bunch
at our girdle; we are amenable to no laws;
money is of no account; Jack is as good as his
master; introductions are not required for
entrance into polite society; the most glaring
impossibilities are incessantly admitted, taken
for granted and reconciled. Whence the name
of this kingdom.

Much more wondrous and full of marvels is
it than the famed land of Cockaigne, than the
country of Prester John, than the ground of
Tom Tidler (whose occupation is now gone
in consequence of the discovery of rival
grounds in California and Australia), than
Raleigh's Dorado, than the Arcadia of
Strephon and Corydon, Celia and Sacharissa;
than the fearful country where there are men

           "—— whose heads
           Do grow beneath their shoulders,"

than even the mirabolant land that Jack saw
when he had gotten to the top of the
beanstalk. The only territorial kingdom that I
can compare it to is one—and even the
duration of that one is fleeting and evanescent,
appearing only for a season, like specks upon
the sun or the floating islands in Windermere
—visible and to be travelled in from the end
of December to the end of the following
February, called the Kingdom of Pantomime.
This kingdom, which, at other seasons of the
year, is as rigorously barred and closed against
strangers as China or Japan or the Stock
Exchange, offers many points of resemblance
to the Kingdom of Reconciled Impossibilities.
There is a voyager therein, one Clown, who,
with Pantaloon his friend and dupe and scapegoat,
dances about the streets, insults and
beats respectable shopkeepers, swindles and
robs ready furnished lodgings, leers at virtuous
matrons, commits burglaries and larcenies in
the broad day (or lamp) light, and perpetrates
child-murders by the dozen, yet goes
"unwhipp'd of justice": nay, he and his
confederate are rewarded, at last, by an ovation
of fireworks and revolving stars; as are also
Harlequin, a lewd fellow in a spangled jerkin
and hose, and a dancing girl they call Columbine;
who together play such fantastic tricks
before the footlights as make the gallery roar
—such tricks as would be tolerated nowhere
but in a Kingdom of Impossibilities. For in
all other kingdoms, theft of fish or sausage
—were it even the smallest gudgeon or the