Just at present, as you have read, the person who calls himself the pore workin'man--the man I saw kicking fallen men in the mud by the docks last winter--has discovered a real, fine, new original notion; and he is working it for all he is worth. He calls it the solidarity of labour _bundobast_; but it's caste--four thousand years old, caste of Menu--with old _shetts_, _mahajuns_, guildtolls, excommunication and all the rest of it. All things considered, there isn't anything much older than caste--it began with the second generation of man on earth--but to read the "advance" papers on the subject you'd imagine it was a revelation from Heaven. The real fun will begin--as it has begun and ended many times before--when the caste of skilled labour--that's the pore workin'man--are pushed up and knocked about by the lower and unrecognised castes, who will form castes of their own and outcaste on the decision of their own _punchayats_. How these castes will scuffle and fight among themselves, and how astonished the Englishman will be! He is naturally lawless because he is a fighting animal; and his amazingly sheltered condition has made him inconsequent. I don't like inconsequent lawlessness. I've seen it down at Bow Street, at the docks, by the G.P.O., and elsewhere. Its chief home, of course, is in that queer place called the House of Commons, but no one goes there who isn't forced by business. It's shut up at present, and the persons who belong to it are loose all over the face of the country. I don't think--but I won't swear--that any of them are spitting at policemen. One man appears to have been poaching, others are advocating various forms of murder and outrage--and nobody seems to care. The residue talk--just heavens, how they talk, and what wonderful fictions they tell! And they firmly believe, being ignorant of the mechanism of Government, that they administer the country. In addition, certain of their newspapers have elaborately worked up a famine in Ireland that could be engineered by two Deputy Commissioners and four average Stunts into a "woe" and a "calamity" that is going to overshadow the peace of the nation--even the Empire. I suppose they have their own sense of proportion, but they manage to keep it to themselves very successfully. What do you, who have seen half a countryside in deadly fear of its life, suppose that this people would do if they were _chukkered_ and _gabraowed_? If they really knew what the fear of death and the dread of injury implied? If they died very swiftly, indeed, and could not count their futile lives enduring beyond next sundown? Some of the men from your--I mean our--part of the world say that they would be afraid and break and scatter and run. But there is no room in the island to run. The sea catches you, midwaist, at the third step. I am curious to see if the cholera, of which these people stand in most lively dread, gets a firm foothold in London. In that case I have a notion that