it depends on and is conditioned by environment; and it is when it is out of harmony with social necessity that murmurings arise and are translated into local disturbance, partial disaffection, and rebellion.

The industrial unrest of the present is not a fresh phenomenon. It extends back through history to the classic instance when the Israelites came out of Egypt, pursued by an armed host. The villeins of England gradually commuted their services for money; and in spite of Acts of Parliament, when labour had become cheap and arable land was turned into pasture, the Courts in the sixteenth century pronounced against villeinage. The Sacred Spring of the Samnites, when the youth went forth to find fresh homes, resembled the exodus from the Scandinavian lands, where famines were frequent, when the people had become sufficiently enlightened to realise that putting their king to death when the harvest was bad, was an exhibition of force that was no remedy; though it possibly may have stimulated the central government into taking steps to encourage emigration to Iceland, Scotland, Ireland, and England.

This solution of industrial trouble is the simplest. It is so obvious that it should be regarded as the wise Trojan did the gift of the horse. It drains the land of the most capable; it carried Greek civilisation into Asia and left Greece defenceless; it made true what Seneca said, "Wheresoever the Roman conquered, there he inhabited," and had its corollary in the line of Lucan, "Slaves till the soil of Italy." An American magazine last year said all the world looked on in wonder at England developing the earth and neglecting its own land.

To understand the industrial problem and its solution, it is necessary to know something of English social history, and to be sure that it is not true, as was said by a famous historian of empire, that "We conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind," but that there was a reason for

the making of all empires, which was to be found in the geography of the time, the knowledge of the world as it was, when each empire rose and fell; and the geography of the heart of the empire. These two factors made the fate that is recorded in imperial history, and to write or talk of them without a knowledge of geography, as it influences social relations, is like the attempt to compile a nautical almanac and ignore astronomy.

The effects of geographical environment are to be found in the mediæval industrial Courts; in them were the solutions of the industrial problems of the time; in them, as far as internal geography is concerned, is found the answer as to why Englishmen had colonising power. The answer as to why England colonised is often given by the statement that England had a colonising aptitude: its industrial Courts show why it had this aptitude, and its industrial Courts had their origin and reason in geography. The thesis that geography is of importance in relation to empire and industry, and in consequence to law, might be supported by abundant facts, but yet be put aside as trivial if not buttressed by authority.

The authority is ample and decisive; it extends back as far as history, even the conquerors of the ancient dynasties grappling on the roads of commerce, or exploring to the south, felt that they had come upon new worlds; in the limited theatre of Greece, where the environment produced not only a number of city states, but a great diversity in their character and government, no intellectual class could fail to note the effect of surroundings upon life. Herodotus noted that the Persians had a tradition that if they were to continue to rule, they must avoid the plains, and continue to dwell in the churlish mountain lands. Aristotle, with the conquest of nearer Asia in his mind, declared that the Asiatics were not wanting in intellectual activity, or skill in the arts, but that they lived listlessly in subjection; and

this, Buckle pointed out thousands of years after, resulted from a life on plains where the means of subsistence is easy. Plato follows on the same side, and concludes with a contemptuous reference to the jurist who leaves these calculations out of the philosophy of law: "To all these matters, diverse winds, and violent heats, waters, the character of the subsistence supplied by the earth, the legislator, if he have any sense in him, must attend as far as man can, and frame his laws accordingly." The military historian could scarcely fail to note how the nature of a country affected campaigns. Herodian and Dion Cassius narrate that the conquest of Britain was rendered incredibly hard by the labour of cutting down woods, and rendering marshy places stable by means of causeways. Cæsar and Tacitus write in the same way of the difficulties of the Roman troops in Gaul and Germany. The northern Scots boasted in their histories that the armies of the Romans failed at the foot of the mountains, as those of the Angles did at Nectansmere. Each country necessitated a different kind of warfare, as each country gave predominance to a special military arm; again, Plato in The Laws, says, that on rough ground you must have infantry, and these will be light-armed archers, while plains produce cavalry. Writers like Aristotle and Plato, or Raleigh and Bacon, see the connection between the constitution and the character of the troops adapted to the country; chivalry belongs to the plains, and infantry to broken ground, so that Greece and Italy produce republics, and England, with plains and mountains, a strong central government with local independence.

The system of industrial Courts, subsisting side by side with a system of itinerant judges, prepared the way for local and national justice to exist together; and for local to broaden into national, and national into imperial justice. But the noblest river runs dry at times, when it ceases to be fed by tributary mountain rills; and national

justice fails to meet the ever-recurring crises of a nation's life when its springs run dry in the daily occupations of its people. As long as its social history is unstudied, so long, when mob-law threatens to reign, the citizen's part will seem to be to look idly on while the police and military cope with the situation. In the Noven.ber number of this Magazine, it was pointed out that the historic law of England made it the duty of each citizen to assist in keeping the peace, because the grand inquest of the nation, representing the whole body, declared, made, and enforced the law. While this duty of local conservators of the peace has been partially forgotton, the local settlement of industrial disputes has totally vanished. There remains but trial by jury, and the intelligence of trained intellects is seen to be superior to the declaration by the people of what they conceive to be justice. If this last vestige of the life of Englishmen who made the Empire were to depart, soon there would be no living memory of why and how it was England built the mightiest Empire ever known in waste lands, carrying with it the capacity for freedom and justice, claiming as the Anglo-Saxons did the laws of their ancient kings, and later demanding through the voices of American Colonists "the wholesome laws of their country," though, as Burke put it, three thousand miles of sea rolled between them and the British Parliament, and between them and Westminster Hall.

Empires owe almost everything to environment, and since the plainest facts are often unconvincing without authority, again to quote it in the writing of Mr. Wallace. It used to be thought that every animal was exactly adapted to the place in which it lived, but in what the unsuitability to other places consisted we could rarely hope to discover. Transferred to the sphere of history, this neglect to note environment gave rise to the universal supposition that foreigners had not prosperous colonies because they were

not fitted for colonisation, while Englishmen had because they were. "The moment, however, there was seen to be a real relation between an animal and its native country, it was admitted that a knowledge of the area occupied by a species or group was a real portion of its natural history, of as much importance as its habits, its structure, or its affinities."

Empire then, industrial peace, the capacity for keeping the King's peace, all depend on national patriotism being buttressed by local duty, and the free and full opportunity that the citizen has of declaring his opinion in matters of every-day life, and in making that opinion felt in the local Courts instead of having only one outlet for his grievances -strikes-which are a form of war, and mob violence, which nearly approaches civil war.

What were the physical conditions that led to industrial Courts? that produced freedom with order? and a constitution that made England a mother of Parliaments? The position of England on the seas led to it being colonised by the most enterprising peoples of the north, and at the same time to its connection with the civilisation of Rome. To these were added its geography and its geology, and in virtue of both the Englishman, as Pericles said of the Athenian, "in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action." The mediæval writer knew the truth, and in Le Débat des Hérauts d'Armes, where the French and English heralds disputed the greatness of their respective countries, the Englishman sets forth the riches of England in three fashions: riches on the land, riches beneath the land, and riches round the land. Industrial occupations are known to-day to influence modes of thought, and Parliamentary representation, and if there was a social geography, it would be seen that what is true to-day is also true of the past. There is not only a geography of political representation, but in civil war.