t of what you have said, and to the point, speak but
vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to the bottom." This is no
sore that can be probed, no sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague
spot. Small or great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth,
that you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless, cancerous; a
putrescence through the constitution of the people is indicated by this
galled place. Because I know this thoroughly, I say so little, and that
little, as your correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as you
say, who might have known more of me, unpractically. Pardon me, I am no
seller of plasters, nor of ounces of civet. The patient's sickness is
his own fault, and only years of discipline will work it out of him.
That is the only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him.

The relation of master and servant involves every other--touches every
condition of moral health through the State. Put that right, and you
put all right; but you will find that it can only come ultimately, not
primarily, right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence you
have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial advice very good.
You need hardly, I think, unless you wanted a type of British logic,
have printed a letter in which the writer accused (or would have
accused, if he had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of
being thieves because he had known one robbery to have been committed by
a nice-looking girl. But on the whole there is much common sense in the
letters; the singular point in them all, to my mind, being the
inapprehension of the breadth and connection of the question, and the
general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the abstract ideas of
sonship and slavery, which include whatever is possible in wise
treatment of servants. It is very strange to see that, while everybody
shrinks at abstract suggestions of there being possible error in a book
of Scripture, your sensible English housewife fearlessly rejects
Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to her own, and that not
one of your many correspondents seems ever to have read the Epistle to
Philemon. It is no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary
position hammer through their Horace at one time or other time of their
school life, no word of his wit or his teaching seems to remain by them:
for all the good they get out of them, the Satires need never have been
written. The Roma