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this respect would be a great encouragement to emigration, and an act of charity too.

When the prime minister of Canada, Sir J. Macdonald, was in London just before parliament was prorogued, he offered grants of the splendid land in Manitoba, 160 acres each to able-bodied emigrants settling there; and he offered to get an act passed by the Colonial parliament to charge the cost of the emigration and support for some months upon the land in case the cost had been advanced by boards of guardians or any other third party, so that, whether the emigrants stayed on the land or sold it, the money should be repaid. A proper efficer of the government was to see to the whole business, and procure repayment. It has long appeared to me that, if advances for emigration were made personal debts from the emigrants to any colony, duly recoverable in a safe and cheap way, by act of Colonial parliament, with proper officers there to enforce payment, if it was not otherwise repaid, it would be a great advantage to many honest poor people who wish to emigrate. We are sure that most emigrants do well, and could repay such advances easily by installments? Why should they not? Some would be lost, perhaps, by the emigrants passing into the States; such loss might be borne; the majority would repay. All the class of healthy boys and girls in our workhouses, growing up and able to work, might thus be sent out, to their great gain and our relief. In our great town workhouses with thousands of paupers, some such resource is much wanted. I am sure that the sentimental thought that it is a hardship on a poor person to be forced by circumstances to emigrate, is a delusion. Irish people, when removed from the influence of their own class, become better workers, more quiet and prosperous. They have better qualities for success in a new country than the English have. The faults of home are their bane, and the proportion of those who succeed in America is very great. To sum up. Agrarian pauperism is the true trouble of Ireland, and an opening for increased production of some sort the only possible cure. In one hundred years' time bad tenants will not produce more from the land than they produce now, but probably much less, as their land becomes more exhausted. Let, therefore, every opportunity for emigration be given to all unsuccessful and bad tenants and to all superfluous laborers, and let the land they occupied go into the hands of those who already hold land and are doing well with it. There is an immense field of employment for some generations in draining, with profit to all. The ordinary loans, at a rate of interest which causes no loss to government, should be continued to landowners, as they have been for many years past; and for two or three years cheaper loans, at 2 or 23 per cent, might be continued to farmers. They will gain by thus borrowing for draining much more than they would gain by any reduction of rent. Until the distress that has been felt all over the kingdom from

the bad crops of two seasons came on, Ireland had greatly advanced from the state it was in at the Union or any time since. It will do so again from natural causes, if only law and order are enforced. The doubt which the foolish speeches and foolish acts of those in authority have raised, whether the law of rights of property will be upheld, has caused a hundred times more hardship to individuals, and to the tenants themselves, than all the hard acts of landlords, and has tended sorely to retard progress.

Mr. Froude truly says, "These words have raised incendiaries and assassins to the rank of patriots, and encouraged them to go on with their work, by telling them that, if they were only violent and mischievous enough, they would have their desires. The one indispensable requirement in Ireland is authority armed with power to make the law obeyed." I cannot add a word to these weighty truths.

Unjust measures, disregarding the rights of property, may gratify the covetuousness of some and the ill-will of others, by injur ing the class of landowners, but they will never improve the social state of the people by a hair's breadth. Better habits alone can

do that. Ireland, like all other countries, contains good and bad of all classes. Some of us who understand farming have no wish to let our land at all, because, from the bad farming so prevalent in the country, we can make much more from it by holding it ourselves. I should be glad to farm every acre of my 3,900 and should add much to my income by doing so. The laborers I should employ would be better off in all ways than most tenants, and their number would be greater. But I have not the least wish to part with my old friends, and have no thought of doing so; only I can see no sense in rooting bad tenants in the soil to be paupers, and the cause of evil for a generation to come, at a heavy loss to me.

The common sense and judgment that produce a prosperous estate and contented tenantry in England and Scotland will do so in Ireland. Whether we are few or many who try to reach this good state, why are our hands to be tied and our efforts hindered, by what is really an effort to give protection to all the bad habits and backward ideas that have made Ireland a byword? Surely, England has not so far lost the qualities that made her what she is, as to be unable to say law and order shall prevail, and upright honesty to all classes alike be maintained, because without these nothing is worth having, nor can any people prosper.

The difference between indolence and industry is much greater than any difference of rent than can be proposed. The difference between order and the rule of the Land League is greater than that between prosperity and ruin.

At bottom the question is whether the dealings between landlord and tenant are to be governed by open free contract, as nearly all other dealings amongst us are, or because in some cases (not always

even in Ireland) some landlords are rich and tenants poor-an artificial system is to be established by act of parliment in hope of redressing this inequality, however much the true progress of the country may thereby retarded by the setting aside of the sound principles of honesty and justice.-W. BENCE JONES, in Macmillan's Magazine.

BUDDHISTS AND BUDDHISM IN BURMAH.

JUDGING from externals, Buddhism is far from being the religion which one would expect to find adopted by the Burmese. They are a jovial, laughing, joking race, brimful of fun and delight, in the simple act of living. Strange it is to find such a people adopting the cold, stern, materialistic philosophy of Buddha. Almost all forms of heathen religion teach men to seek for some sort of happiness here. Christian forms of belief call this folly, and bid all live such a holy and self denying life on earth that they may find perfect happiness hereafter in a better world beyond. The Buddhist comes between and exclaims: "Cease this foolish petty longing for personal happiness. The one life is as hollow as the other. Aneitsa, Dokkha, Anatta-all is transitory, sad, unreal.” Such a faith one might think suitable for the sullen, truculent Malay, but we cannot understand the Burman holding such a purely ethical religion and still retaining his constant bonhomie. Buddhism denies the existence of a Creator or of anything created. "There

is nothing eternal; the very universe itself is passing away; nothing is, everything becomes; and all that you see or feel, bodily or mentally, of yourself, will pass away like everything else; there will only remain the accumulated result of all your actions, words and thoughts. The consciousness of self is a delusion; the organized being, sentient existence, since it is not infinite, bound up inextricably with ignorance, and therefore with sin, and therefore with sorrow." And so the true Buddhist saint does not mar the purity of his self denial by lusting after a positive happiness, which he himself shall enjoy here or hereafter. Here it comes of ignorance, and leads to sin, which leads to sorrow; and there the conditions of existence are the same, and each new birth will leave you ignorant and finite still. All that is to be hoped for is the joy and rest of Nirvana, Neikban, the Buddhist summum bonum, a blissful holy existence, a moral condition, a sinless, calm state of mind, practically the extinction of our being. Unutterably sad one would say for despairing and earnest hearts, and more than enough to arouse the pity of every man, not to say of every Christian man. Yet this is the faith of the light-hearted Burmans, one of the most lovable of races on the face of the earth; and the devoted labors of Anglican,

Roman and Baptist missionaries for a couple of decades have been almost resultless, even in persuading the Burman of the hopelessness of his creed. The gayly-dressed, laughing crowd of Burmese young men and maidens go not the less merrily along the streets. Four times in each lunar month the Pagoda steps are thronged by old and young alike. They make offerings of fruits and flowers to they hardly know what; they offer up prayers as to a supreme Deity, and deny that there is such a being; they prostrate themselves before images of Guadama, and declare that they do not worship them as idols. The young sing and make merry. The old calmly meet death, with their rosaries in their hands, patiently telling their beads. Yet they tell you their faith is summed up in the words, Aneitsa, Dokkha, Anatta transitoriness, misery, unreality-words of hopelessness and despair. If we look below the surface we can hardly say that this merry heartiness of the young, and this tranquil resignation of the old, is due in the one case to simple thoughtlessness and carelessness, and in the other to blind resignation and blank ignorance of what their future state shall be. Let us rather turn to the habits of the people and their system of education for an explanation.

It is in the monastic schools that the strength of Buddhism lies, and it is by means of them that the faith is kept active in the country. The whole land is overspread with these kyoungs, or monasteries, and through them passes, with hardly a single exception, the entire male population of the country. Outside every village, no matter how small, stands one of these kyoungs. Away from the noise of the people, with great, well-foliaged trees to shield them from the heat, and cocoa-nut and areca palms, mangoes, and jacks, and other fruit trees to supply them with occasional luxuries, the monk's position seems well calculated to rouse the envy of those who are tired of nineteenth-century theological and polemical discussions, and do not care to have it clearly demonstrated to them that Tiberius and Cataline are much maligned individuals, and that Judas Iscariot has been greatly wronged by the consensus of centuries in regarding him as the type of baseness and hideous guilt. There the hpongyees pass their time without a care to ruffle the tranquil surface of their lives. They have no trouble for their food, for a pious and kindly population supplies them far beyond their requirements. They are monks, not priests, and have no duties to perform for the laity in return for this support. Their minds are never racked by the excogitation of that too frequently excruciating formality of the Christian church, a sermon. Their natural rest is never broken in upon by calls to minister consolation and comfort to the sick and the dying. Even their leisure is never interrupted to execute the last rites for the dead. They are not ministers of religion, they are monks, and all they have to do is to work out their own deliverance and salvation without regard to any one else.

Latterly, some of them have, indeed, assumed something of the priestly character in performing ceremonies which are supposed to confer merit on those in whose names they are accomplished; and certain duties which most of them assume, such as reading the sacred books to the people, and instructing youth, are of a pastoral nature. All that is compulsory on them is the observation of continence, poverty and humility, with abstraction from the world, tenderness to all living things, and the obligation of certain moral precepts, and numerous ritual observances. As members of the holy Sangha, one of the precious triad, the hpongyees are approached with tokens of worship by the laity, in recognition of their ascetic life. The members of the order lay claim, often with very little ground, to superior wisdom and sanctity, but not to any spiritual powers. Indeed, in a religious system which acknowledges no supreme God, it is impossible for any one to become an intercessor between a creator whose existence is denied, and man who can only attain to a higher state by his own personal exertions and earnest self-denial. Where there are no Gods, no one is required to avert their anger or sue for their pity by fervent prayer. Consequently not even Guadama himself could attain to the position of Peter, and claim to hold the keys of heaven and hell. The doors of the kyoung are always open as well to those who wish to enter, as to those who wish to leave it. As a matter of fact, almost every Burman-certainly every respectable Burman-at some period of his life, dons, for a longer or shorter time, the yellow robe of the monk.

There is but one order, but there are grades in sanctity and approximation to the final release. Most of the scholars, who enter these Talapoinic houses, put on the yellow robe; thus at the same time learning to read and write, and acquiring kutho, or merits for future existences. Some, especially nowadays in British Burma, never do so, or only for a few days; not a few for no longer than twenty-four days. In Upper Burmah, however, the desire for merit seems much greater, or perhaps we may say, the knowledge of the value of time is altogether wanting, as it certainly exists only in very modified fashion in our provinces. At any rate, in Independent Burmah the adoption of the yellow monkish garments for a season is almost universal. These disciples or novices are called Shins or Koyins. His entry into the monastic orders is perhaps the most important event in the life of the Burman. Only under the robe of the recluse, and through the abandonment of the world, can he completely fulfill the law, and hope to find the way to eventual deliverance from the misery of ever-recurring existences. The common time for the ceremony is just before the Wa, or Buddist Lent, lasting from July to October, roughly speaking. During Lent no ceremony or feast is lawful, and most of the more respectable Burmans send

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