impatient
proceedings; and this I will endeavor to show you in my next letter.

LETTER III.

OF TRUE LEGISLATION. THAT EVERY MAN MAY BE A LAW TO HIMSELF.

_February 17, 1867._

9. No, I have not been much worse in health; but I was asked by a
friend to look over some work in which you will all be deeply
interested one day, so that I could not write again till now. I was
the more sorry, because there were several things I wished to note in
your last letter; one especially leads me directly to what I in any
case was desirous of urging upon you. You say, "In vol. 6th of
'Frederick the Great' I find a great deal that I feel quite certain,
if our Queen or Government could make law, thousands of our English
workmen would hail with a shout of joy and gladness." I do not
remember to what you especially allude, but whatever the rules you
speak of may be, unless there be anything in them contrary to the
rights of present English property, why should you care whether the
Government makes them law or not? Can you not, you thousands of
English workmen, simply make them a law to yourselves, by practising
them?

It is now some five or six years since I first had occasion to speak
to the members of the London Working Men's College on the subject of
Reform, and the substance of what I said to them was this: "You are
all agape, my friends, for this mighty privilege of having your
opinions represented in Parliament. The concession might be
desirable,--at all events courteous,--if only it were quite certain
you had got any opinions to represent. But have you? Are you agreed on
any single thing you systematically want? Less work and more wages, of
course; but how much lessening of work do you suppose is possible? Do
you think the time will ever come for everybody to have _no_ work and
_all_ wages? Or have you yet taken the trouble so much as to think out
the nature of the true connection between wages and work, and to
determine, even approximately, the real quantity of the one, that can,
according to the laws of God and nature, be given for the other; for,
rely on it, make what laws you like, that quantity only can you at
last get.

10. "Do you know how many mouths can be fed on an acre of land, or how
fast those mouths multiply? and have you considered what is to be done
finally with unfeedable mouths? 'Send them to be fed elsewhere,' do
you say? Have you, then, formed any opi