ills them? The rates (taxes) of course, and in London, the
last winter I was there, some six years ago, 80,000 paupers and beggars
were receiving public aid. "The laws of trade" is to make things right.
I think that is the name of the modern redeemer of men. If work is not
there and food is not there, man will flow at his own sweet will, like
water seeking its level, until he finds his food and his work
somewhere. But if man's "sweet will" decides not to flow, but to lie
down and make his bed in your _pockets_, and feed on the contents in
the shape of taxes--what is to come then? Why, he must be depleted, or
he will deplete _you_. How to deplete him is a most interesting
question? He does not deplete himself, for it is manifest to men that
paupers in England and America get children as fast as they can; and
the clergy applaud and say, "Be fruitful and multiply." There is no
continence among them--none anywhere except in wicked France.

In the "good time coming" in England, the pauper will lie down with the
prince, and there will be peace while the pauper devours the prince; or
there will be pestilence, which is a sure depleter; or the idle army
may be used to deplete the mob. Who can say?

"But there is no danger! Of course not. Why croak?"

What has been will be, under the benign influence of cheap labor and
free trade--perhaps! Let me go on with my pleasant tale--do not
interrupt--I have the word--by and by you.

At this moment, to-day, this year of our Lord 1877, the merchant
princes of London, the manufacturing barons of Manchester are at their
wits' ends; for people refuse to buy the products of their mills.
Germany will not have them, and France will not, and America chooses to
make her own; and even India, ungrateful that she is, has gone to
spinning her own cotton. Mills are being closed in England, furnaces
are blown out, wages are reduced, and workmen are threatening to
_strike_, or have struck, and are settling down for a comfortable
winter upon the _rates_. All right! England has "developed her
resources," and trade is free. Let her sing hosannahs, and cry, "Glory
be to our god," for no such beautiful "progress" was ever seen on earth
before.

What is to happen to the 300,000 or half million land-owners of
England, if outside pig-headed peoples wilfully and maliciously refuse
to buy the mill products of England and so to feed the 37,200,000
people of England who have no land upon which to raise their ow