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THE NATURE OF THEFT BY UNJUST PROFITS.--CRIME CAN FINALLY BE ARRESTED ONLY BY EDUCATION.

The first two of these means of obtaining riches are, in some forms and within certain limits, lawful, and advantageous to the State. The third is entirely detrimental to it; for in all cases of profit derived from speculation, at best, what one man gains another loses; and the net results to the State is zero, with the loss of the time and ingenuity spent in the transaction; besides the disadvantage involved in the discouragement of the losing party, and the corrupted moral natures of both. This is the result of speculation at its best. At its worst, not only B loses what A gains , but C and D, who never had any chance at all, are drawn in by B's fall, and the final result is that A sets up his carriage on the collected sum which was once the means of living to a dozen families.

And then consider farther, how many of the carriages that glitter in our streets are driven, and how many of the stately houses that gleam among our English fields are inhabited, by this kind of thief!

OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IRRESPECTIVE OF CLASS-DISTINCTION. IT CONSISTS ESSENTIALLY IN GIVING HABITS OF MERCY, AND HABITS OF TRUTH.

"Mercy," in its full sense, means delight in perceiving nobleness, or in doing kindness. Compare ? 50.

And purchasable they are at the beginning of life, though not at its close. Purchasable, always, for others, if not for ourselves. You can buy, and cheaply, life, endless life, according to your Christian's creed-- but--long years of knowledge, and peace, and power, and happiness of love--these assuredly and irrespectively of any creed or question,--for all those desolate and haggard children about your streets.

And the elements of this general State education should be briefly these:

Therefore, first teach--as I have said in the preface to 'Unto this Last'--"The Laws of Health, and exercises enjoined by them;" and, to this end, your schools must be in fresh country, and amidst fresh air, and have great extents of land attached to them in permanent estate. Riding, running, all the honest, personal exercises of offense and defense, and music, should be the primal heads of this bodily education.

THE RELATIONS OF EDUCATION TO POSITION IN LIFE.

Well, I wish, my friend, you would write me a word or two in answer to this, telling me your own ideas as to the proper issue out of these difficulties. I should like to know what you think, and what you suppose others will think, before I tell you my own notions about the matter.

THE HARMFUL EFFECTS OF SERVILE EMPLOYMENTS. THE POSSIBLE PRACTICE AND EXHIBITION OF SINCERE HUMILITY BY RELIGIOUS PERSONS.

Thus much, it seems to me, one might say with some hope of acceptance, to any very earnest member of either of our two great religious parties, if, as I say, their faith could stand a strain. I have not, however, based any of my imaginary political arrangements on the probability of its doing so; and I trust only to such general good nature and willingness to help each other, as I presume may be found among men of the world; to whom I should have to make quite another sort of speech, which I will endeavor to set down the heads of, for you, in next letter.

THE GENERAL PRESSURE OF EXCESSIVE AND IMPROPER WORK, IN ENGLISH LIFE.

If you are able to do anything I would send particulars of the age and sex of the children.

I remain, dear Sir, ever obediently yours, FRED. J. SHIELDS.

Observe, farther, whatever help the orphans may receive, will not be from the public at all. It will not be from those who profited by their father's labors; it will be chiefly from his fellow-laborers; or from persons whose money would have been beneficially spent in other directions, from whence it is drawn away to this need, which ought never to have occurred,--while those who waste their money without doing any service to the public will never contribute one farthing to this distress.

OF IMPROVIDENCE IN MARRIAGE IN THE MIDDLE CLASSES; AND OF THE ADVISABLE RESTRICTIONS OF IT.

SIR,--

May I beg for the favor of your presentation to Christ's Hospital for my youngest son, M. N.? I have nine children, and no means to educate them. I ventured to address you, believing that my husband's name is not unknown to you as an artist.

Is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a Celestial Empire, such as that of these British Isles?

It is enough, I think, to say here that the beginning of all sanitary and moral law is in the regulation of marriage, and that, ugly and fatal as is every form and agency of license, no licentiousness is so mortal as licentiousness in marriage.

"Which gives to all the self-same bent, Whose lives are wise and innocent,"

OF THE DIGNITY OF THE FOUR FINE ARTS; AND OF THE PROPER SYSTEM OF RETAIL TRADE.

I cannot tell you the contempt I feel for the common writers on political economy, in their stupefied missing of this first principle of all human economy--individual or political--to live, namely, with as few wants as possible, and to waste nothing of what is given you to supply them.

And the degree in which you recognize the difference between these two kinds of services, is precisely what makes the difference between your being a civilized person or a barbarian. If you keep slaves to furnish forth your dress--to glut your stomach--sustain your indolence--or deck your pride, you are a barbarian. If you keep servants, properly cared for, to furnish you with what you verily want, and no more than that--you are a "civil" person--a person capable of the qualities of citizenship.

Compare 'The Crown of Wild Olive,' ?? 79, 118, and 122.

It will facilitate the examination of these if we put them for the moment aside, and pass to the other division of our dilemma, the question, namely, what kind of lives our gentlemen and ladies are to live, for whom all this hard work is to be done.

OF THE NORMAL POSITION AND DUTIES OF THE UPPER CLASSES. GENERAL STATEMENT OF THE LAND QUESTION.

Those who are superior by forethought and industry, have for their function to be the providences of the foolish, the weak, and the idle; and to establish such systems of trade and distribution of goods as shall preserve the lower orders from perishing by famine, or any other consequence of their carelessness or folly, and to bring them all, according to each man's capacity, at last into some harmonious industry.

The third class, of scholars and artists, of course, have for function the teaching and delighting of the inferior multitude.

The office of the upper classes, then, as a body, is to keep order among their inferiors, and raise them always to the nearest level with themselves of which those inferiors are capable. So far as they are thus occupied, they are invariably loved and reverenced intensely by all beneath them, and reach, themselves, the highest types of human power and beauty.

And we were to consider the proper duties of all these, and the laws probably expedient respecting them. Whereupon, in the outset, we are at once brought face to face with the great land question.

An island of a certain size has standing room only for so many people; feeding ground for a great many fewer than could stand on it. Reach the limits of your feeding ground, and you must cease to multiply, must emigrate or starve. The modes in which the pressure is gradually brought to bear on the population depend on the justice of your laws; but the pressure itself must come at last, whatever the distribution of the land. And arithmeticians seem to me a little slow to remark the importance of the old child's puzzle about the nails in the horseshoe--when it is populations that are doubling themselves, instead of farthings.

And this essential land question--"At what point will you stop?"--is itself two-fold. You have to consider first, by what methods of land distribution you can maintain the greatest number of healthy persons; and secondly, whether, if, by any other mode of distribution and relative ethical laws, you can raise their character, while you diminish their numbers, such sacrifice should be made, and to what extent? I think it will be better, for clearness' sake, to end this letter with the putting of these two queries in their decisive form, and to reserve suggestions of answer for my next.

OF THE JUST TENURE OF LANDS: AND THE PROPER FUNCTIONS OF HIGH PUBLIC OFFICERS.

Such disturbance, however, is only too likely to take place, if the existing theories of political economy are allowed credence much longer. In the writings of the vulgar economists, nothing more excites my indignation than the subterfuges by which they endeavor to accommodate their pseudoscience to the existing abuses of wealth, by disguising the true nature of rent. I will not waste time in exposing their fallacies, but will put the truth for you into as clear a shape as I can.

See ? 156.

Yet all these may, on certain terms, be bound, or secured in possession, to particular persons under certain conditions. For instance, it may be proper, at a certain time, to give a man permission to possess land, as you give him permission to marry; and farther, if he wishes it and works for it, to secure to him the land needful for his life; as you secure his wife to him; and make both utterly his own, without in the least admitting his right to buy other people's wives, or fields, or to sell his own.

And now for the occupation of this body of men, maintained at fixed perennial cost of the State.

They would be trained, all of them, in perfect science of war, and in perfect science of essential law. And from their body should be chosen the captains and the judges of England, its advocates, and generally its State officers, all such functions being held for fixed pay , and no function connected with the administration of law ever paid by casual fee. And the head of such family should, in his own right, having passed due examination in the science of law, and not otherwise, be a judge, law-ward or Lord, having jurisdiction both in civil and criminal cases, such as our present judges have, after such case shall have been fully represented before, and received verdict from, a jury, composed exclusively of the middle or lower orders, and in which no member of the aristocracy should sit. But from the decision of these juries, or from the Lord's sentence, there should be a final appeal to a tribunal, the highest in the land, held solely in the King's name, and over which, in the capital, the King himself should preside, and therein give judgment on a fixed number of days in each year;--and, in other places and at other times, judges appointed by election out of any order of men in the State : and all causes brought before these judges should be decided, without appeal, by their own authority; not by juries. This, then, recasting it for you into brief view, would be the entire scheme of state authorities:--

Supreme judges appointed by national election; exercising sole authority in courts of final appeal.

Ordinary judges, holding the office hereditarily under conditions; and with power to add to their number ; the office of such judges being to administer the national laws under the decision of juries.

State officers charged with the direction of public agency in matters of public utility.

Bishops, charged with offices of supervision and aid, to family by family, and person by person.

The officers of war, of various ranks.

The officers of public instruction, of various ranks.

I have sketched out this scheme for you somewhat prematurely, for I would rather have conducted you to it step by step, and as I brought forward the reasons for the several parts of it; but it is, on other grounds, desirable that you should have it to refer to, as I go on.

I intend, however, to write to you at this moment one more letter, partly explanatory of minor details necessarily omitted in this, and chiefly of the proper office of the soldier; and then I must delay the completion of even this poor task until after the days have turned, for I have quite other work to do in the brightness of the full-opened spring.

Without pausing to dwell on the objection that land cannot be improved beyond a certain point, and that, at the reaching of that point, farther claim to tenure would cease, on Mr. Mill's principle--take even this admission, with its proper subsequent conclusion, that "in no sound theory of private property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered on it." Now, had that conclusion been farther followed, it would have compelled the admission that all rent was unjustifiable which normally maintained any person in idleness; which is indeed the whole truth of the matter. But Mr. Mill instantly retreats from this perilous admission; and after three or four pages of discussion of the limits of power in management of the land itself , he begs the whole question at issue in one brief sentence, slipped cunningly into the middle of a long one which appears to be telling all the other way, and in which the fatal assertion nestles itself, as if it had been already proved,--thus--I italicize the unproved assertion in which the venom of the entire falsehood is concentrated.

With at last the natural consequences of cowardice,--nitro-glycerine and fire-balls! Let the upper classes speak the truth about themselves boldly, and they will know how to defend themselves fearlessly. It is equivocation in principle, and dereliction from duty, which melt at last into tears in a mob's presence.--

THE OFFICE OF THE SOLDIER.

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