one's picture,
with a crook in one's hand, as Alexis, or Daphne. Just as liberty was
fast dying out of Greece, and the successors of Alexander were founding
their monarchies, and Rome was growing up to crush in its iron grasp all
states save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the world, to open
them in his dreamy Atlantis. Just in the grimmest period of English
history, with the axe hanging over his head, Sir Thomas More gives you
his _Utopia_. Just when the world is to be the theatre of a new
Sesostris, the dreamers of France tell you that the age is too
enlightened for war, that man is henceforth to be governed by pure
reason and live in a Paradise. Very pretty reading all this to a man
like me, Lenny, who can admire and smile at it. But to you, to the man
who has to work for his living, to the man who thinks it would be so
much more pleasant to live at his ease in a phalanstere than to work
eight or ten hours a day; to the man of talent, and action, and
industry, whose future is invested in that tranquillity and order of a
state, in which talent, and action, and industry are a certain
capital;--why Messrs. Coutts, the great bankers, had better encourage a
theory to upset the system of banking! Whatever disturbs society, yea,
even by a causeless panic, much more by an actual struggle, falls first
upon the market of labor, and thence affects prejudicially every
department of intelligence. In such times the arts are arrested;
literature is neglected; people are too busy to read any thing save
appeals to their passions. And capital, shaken in its sense of security,
no longer ventures boldly through the land, calling forth all the
energies of toil and enterprise, and extending to every workman his
reward. Now Lenny, take this piece of advice. You are young, clever, and
aspiring; men rarely succeed in changing the world; but a man seldom
fails of success if he lets the world alone, and resolves to make the
best of it. You are in the midst of the great crisis of your life; it is
the struggle between the new desires knowledge excites, and that sense
of poverty, which those desires convert either into hope and emulation,
or into envy and despair. I grant that it is an uphill work that lies
before you; but don't you think it is always easier to climb a mountain
than it is to level it? These books call on you to level a mountain; and
that mountain is the property of other people, subdivided amongst a
great many proprietors,