[48] For the _Gazette's_ reply to this, see the notes to the following letter. [From "The Pall Mall Gazette," May 2, 1865.] _WORK AND WAGES._ _To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_ SIR: I have not hastened my reply to your last letter, thinking that your space at present would be otherwise occupied; having also my own thoughts busied in various directions, such as you may fancy; yet busied chiefly in a sad wonder, which perhaps you would not fancy. I mourn for Mr. Lincoln,[49] as man should mourn the fate of man, when it is sudden and supreme. I hate regicide as I do populicide--deeply, if frenzied; more deeply, if deliberate. But my wonder is in remembering the tone of the English people and press respecting this man during his life; and in comparing it with their sayings of him in his death. They caricatured and reviled him when his cause was poised in deadly balance--when their praise would have been grateful to him, and their help priceless. They now declare his cause to have been just, when it needs no aid; and his purposes to have been noble, when all human thoughts of them have become vanity, and will never so much as mix their murmurs in his ears with the sentence of the Tribunal which has summoned him to receive a juster praise and tenderer blame than ours. I have twice (I see) used the word "just" inadvertently, forgetting that it has no meaning, or may mean (you tell me) quite what we choose; and that so far as it has a meaning, "the important question is not whether the action is just." Indeed when I read this curious sentence in your reply on Tuesday last, "Justice, as we use it, implies merely the conformity of an action to any rules whatever, good or bad," I had nearly closed the discussion by telling you that there remained no ground on which we could meet, for the English workmen, in whose name I wrote to you, asked, not for conformity with bad rules, but enactment of good ones. But I will not pounce upon these careless sentences, which you are forced to write in all haste, and at all disadvantage, while I have the definitions and results determined through years of quiet labor, lying ready at my hand. You never meant what you wrote (when I said I would not tell you of unconscious meanings, I did not promise not to tell you of unconscious wants of meanings); but it is for you to tell _me_ what you mean by a bad rule, and what by a good one. Of the law of the Eternal Lawgiver, it is dictated that "the commandment is holy, and just, and good." Not merely that it is a law; but that it is such and such a law. Are these terms senseless to you? or do you understand by them only that the observance of that law is generally conducive to our interests? And if so, what _are_ our interests? Have we ever an interest in _being_ something, as well as in getting something; may not even all getting be at last summed in being? is it not the uttermost of interests to be just rather than unjust? Let