GENIUS AND PRECOCITY. 469 



merely to exchange rent for an equal financial burden of interest, yet, 

 as events have proved, their bargains, though good, have been less 

 profitable than was anticipated. Since 1875 the vast areas in the far 

 West and Northwest brought under cultivation have greatly reduced 

 the prices of farm produce, and have at the same time powerfully at- 

 tracted the emigrating classes of the Atlantic seaboard. 



Rhetoric, in so far as it prophesied a wonderful impetus to the 

 island when leaseholds gave place to freeholds, has somewhat missed 

 fulfillment. Unthrifty farmers were not born again to thriftiness by 

 the act of 1875. The money-lender has taken the place of the land- 

 lord with a good many of them. His terms are not so easy, nor his 

 methods so gentle, and already about a fourth of the farms of the isl- 

 and are mortgaged at rates of interest averaging about seven and a half 

 per cent. A single solicitor in Charlottetown has stowed in his vault 

 mortgages to the amount of half a million dollars, held chiefly by 

 widows and orphans, whose claims, unlike those of the wealthy pro- 

 prietors, are exigent and must be promptly met. 



The lesson from the history of land-proprietorship in Prince Ed- 

 ward Island is applicable to a wider field than the little Canadian 

 province. It marks the unwisdom of governments in granting large 

 tracts to corporations or individuals on nominal terms. With the 

 lapse of years, if holdings are retained by their original grantees, the 

 rise in value is enormous, and a community which has chiefly created 

 that value resents the levy of " unearned increment." The agitation 

 in Prince Edward Island also illustrates how the wide franchises 

 of democracy modify the violence of combats concerning questions 

 of property. Even though the mistakes of the Old World be some- 

 times repeated in the New, though unwarrantable privileges be created 

 or acquired, the people possess a power in the ballot-box which renders 

 unnecessary those appeals to the cartridge-box which so often accom- 

 pany transatlantic agitation. Perhaps, when English Hodge awakens 

 to his new influence as a voter, laws partly of his making may take 

 the color of his interests, and English landed property may be further 

 shorn of privilege. Beyond that may also be exerted the sinister influ- 

 ence against contract to which law-makers with little property, or none, 

 are ever strongly tempted. 



-*-- 



GENIUS AND PRECOCITY. 



Bt JAMES SULLY. 

 I. 



THE idea that genius reveals itself early in life does not at once 

 recommend itself to common sense. Observation of Nature as a 

 whole suggests, first of all, perhaps that her choicer and more costly 

 gifts are the result of a long process of preparation. And, however 



