ng as of Mene, Mene. Men and brothers,
on your Sliding-scale you seem sliding, and to have slid,--you little
know whither! Good God! did not a French Donothing Aristocracy, hardly
above half a century ago, declare in like manner, and in its
featherhead believe in like manner, "We cannot exist, and continue to
dress and parade ourselves, on the just rent of the soil of France;
but we must have farther payment than rent of the soil, we must be
exempted from taxes too,"--we must have a Corn-Law to extend our rent?
This was in 1789: in four years more--Did you look into the Tanneries
of Meudon, and the long-naked making for themselves breeches of human
skins! May the merciful Heavens avert the omen; may we be wiser, that
so we be less wretched.

* * * * *

A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on
precipices; from the roots of which all the earth has been crumbling.
Nature owns no man who is not a Martyr withal. Is there a man who
pretends to live luxuriously housed up; screened from all work, from
want, danger, hardship, the victory over which is what we name
work--he himself to sit serene, amid down-bolsters and appliances, and
have all his work and battling done by other men? And such man calls
himself a _noble_-man? His fathers worked for him, he says; or
successfully gambled for him: here _he_ sits; professes, not in sorrow
but in pride, that he and his have done no work, time out of mind. It
is the law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe,
that he, alone of recorded men, shall have no task laid on him, except
that of eating his cooked victuals, and not flinging himself out of
window. Once more I will say, there was no stranger spectacle ever
shown under this Sun. A veritable fact in our England of the
Nineteenth Century. His victuals he does eat: but as for keeping in
the inside of the window,--have not his friends, like me, enough to
do? Truly, looking at his Corn-Laws, Game-Laws, Chandos-Clauses,
Bribery-Elections and much else, you do shudder over the tumbling and
plunging he makes, held back by the lapels and coatskirts; only a thin
fence of window-glass before him,--and in the street mere horrid iron
spikes! My sick brother, as in hospital-maladies men do, thou dreamest
of Paradises and Eldorados, which are far from thee. 'Cannot I do what
I like with my own?' Gracious Heaven, my brother, this that thou seest
with those sick eyes is no firm E