_will_ assuredly come when the merchants of a state shall be its
true ministers of exchange, its porters, in the double sense of carriers
and gate-keepers, bringing all lands into frank and faithful
communication, and knowing for their master of guild, Hermes the herald,
instead of Mercury the gain-guarder.

155. And now, finally, for immediate rule to all who will accept it.

The distress of any population means that they need food, house-room,
clothes, and fuel. You can never, therefore, be wrong in employing any
labourer to produce food, house-room, clothes, or fuel; but you are
_always_ wrong if you employ him to produce nothing, (for then some
other labourer must be worked double time to feed him); and you are
generally wrong, at present, if you employ him (unless he can do nothing
else) to produce works of art or luxuries; because modern art is mostly
on a false basis, and modern luxury is criminally great.[92]

156. The way to produce more food is mainly to bring in fresh ground,
and increase facilities of carriage;--to break rock, exchange earth,
drain the moist, and water the dry, to mend roads, and build harbours of
refuge. Taxation thus spent will annihilate taxation, but spent in war,
it annihilates revenue.

157. The way to produce house-room is to apply your force first to the
humblest dwellings. When your brick-layers are out of employ, do not
build splendid new streets, but better the old ones; send your paviours
and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are
healthily lodged, before you try your hand on stately architecture. You
will find its stateliness rise better under the trowel afterwards; and
we do do not yet build so well that we need hasten to display our skill
to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of
Parliament filled, instead, rents in walls and roofs throughout the
county of Middlesex; and our deputies met to talk within massive walls
that would have needed no stucco for five hundred years,--the decoration
might have been afterwards, and the talk now. And touching even our
highly conscientious church building, it may be well to remember that in
the best days of church plans, their masons called themselves "logeurs
du bon Dieu;" and that since, according to the most trusted reports, God
spends a good deal of His time in cottages as well as in churches, He
might perhaps like to be a little better lodged there also.

158. The way to get more clothes