discovery or contrivance. I have no doubt that the final interest of
every nation is to check the action of these commercial lotteries; and
that all great accidental gains or losses should be national,--not
individual. But speculation absolute, unconnected with commercial
effort, is an unmitigated evil in a state, and the root of countless
evils beside.

[91] [I desire in the strongest terms to reinforce all that is contained
in this paragraph.]

[92] It is especially necessary that the reader should keep his mind
fixed on the methods of consumption and destruction, as the true sources
of national poverty. Men are apt to call every exchange "expenditure,"
but it is only consumption which is expenditure. A large number of the
purchases made by the richer classes are mere forms of interchange of
unused property, wholly without effect on national prosperity. It
matters nothing to the state whether, if a china pipkin be rated as
worth a hundred pounds, A has the pipkin and B the pounds, or A the
pounds and B the pipkin. But if the pipkin is pretty, and A or B breaks
it, there is national loss, not otherwise. So again, when the loss has
really taken place, no shifting of the shoulders that bear it will do
away with the reality of it. There is an intensely ludicrous notion in
the public mind respecting the abolishment of debt by denying it. When a
debt is denied, the lender loses instead of the borrower, that is all;
the loss is precisely, accurately, everlastingly the same. The Americans
borrow money to spend in blowing up their own houses. They deny their
debt, by one-third already [1863], gold being at fifty premium; and they
will probably deny it wholly. That merely means that the holders of the
notes are to be the losers instead of the issuers. The quantity of loss
is precisely equal, and irrevocable; it is the quantity of human
industry spent in effecting the explosion, plus the quantity of goods
exploded. Honour only decides _who_ shall pay the sum lost not whether
it is to be paid or not. Paid it must be, and to the uttermost farthing.

[93] [(_Past and Present._ Chap. IX. of Third Section.) To think that
for these twenty--now twenty-six--years, this one voice of Carlyle's has
been the only faithful and useful utterance in all England, and has
sounded through all these years in vain! See _Fors Clavigera_, Letter
X.]

[94] [We don't want to produce more fuel just now, but much less; and to
use what we get for coo