can train
a man to so much unselfishness as to offer himself fearlessly to the
chance of being shot, in the course of his daily duty, you can most
assuredly, if you make it also a point of honor with him, train him to
the amount of self-denial involved in looking you out with care such a
piece of cheese or bacon as you have asked for.

135. You see that I have already much diminished the number of
employments involving degradation; and raised the character of many of
those that are left. There remain to be considered the necessarily
painful or mechanical works of mining, forging, and the like: the
unclean, noisome, or paltry manufactures--the various kinds of
transport--(by merchant shipping, etc.) and the conditions of menial
service.

It will facilitate the examination of these if we put them for the
moment aside, and pass to the other division of our dilemma, the
question, namely, what kind of lives our gentlemen and ladies are to
live, for whom all this hard work is to be done.

LETTER XXII.

OF THE NORMAL POSITION AND DUTIES OF THE UPPER CLASSES. GENERAL
STATEMENT OF THE LAND QUESTION.

_April 17, 1867._

136. In passing now to the statement of conditions affecting the
interests of the upper classes, I would rather have addressed these
closing letters to one of themselves than to you, for it is with their
own faults and needs that each class is primarily concerned. As,
however, unless I kept the letters private, this change of their
address would be but a matter of courtesy and form, not of any
true prudential use; and as besides I am now no more inclined to
reticence--prudent or otherwise; but desire only to state the facts
of our national economy as clearly and completely as may be, I pursue
the subject without respect of persons.

137. Before examining what the occupation and estate of the upper
classes ought, as far as may reasonably be conjectured, finally to
become, it will be well to set down in brief terms what they actually
have been in past ages: for this, in many respects, they must also
always be. The upper classes, broadly speaking, are originally
composed of the best-bred (in the mere animal sense of the term), the
most energetic, and most thoughtful, of the population, who either by
strength of arm seize the land from the rest, and make slaves of them,
or bring desert land into cultivation, over which they have therefore,
within cer