but people tell me "money isn't what it was in your father's time, everything is so much dearer." I should be heartily glad to learn from your correspondent as much pecuniary botany as will enable me to set my money a-growing; and in the mean time, as I have thus given a quite indubitable instance of my notions of the way money is made, will he be so kind as to give us, not an heraldic example in the dark ages (though I suspect I know more of the pedigree of money, if he comes to that, than he does),[63] but a living example of a rich gentleman who _has_ made his money by saving an _equal_ portion of profit in some mutually beneficent partnership with his laborers? I am, Sir, your obedient servant, J. RUSKIN. BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, King Charles the Martyr, 1873. P.S.--I see by Christie & Manson's advertisement that some of the best bits of work of a good laborer I once knew, J. M. W. Turner (the original plates namely of the "Liber Studiorum"), are just going to be destroyed by some of his affectionate relations. May I beg your correspondent to explain, for your readers' benefit, this charming case of hereditary accumulation? FOOTNOTES: [62] W. R. G. had declared that the rich man (or his ancestors) got the money "by co-operation with the poor ... by, in fact, entering into a mutually beneficent partnership with them, and advancing them their share of the joint profits ... paying them beforehand, in a word." [63] W. R. G. had written: "In nine cases out of ten, in the case of acquired wealth, we should probably find, were the pedigree traced fairly and far back enough, that the original difference between the now rich man and the now poor man was, that the latter habitually spent all his earnings, and the former habitually saved a portion of his in order that it might accumulate and fructify." [Date and place of publication unknown.] _COMMERCIAL MORALITY._[64] MY DEAR SIR: Mr. Johnson's speech in the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, which you favor me by sending, appears to me the most important event that has occurred in relation to the true interests of the country during my lifetime. It begins an era of true civilization. I shall allude to it in the "Fors" of March, and make it the chief subject of the one following (the matter of this being already prepared).[65] It goes far beyond what I had even hoped to hear admitted--how much less enforced so gravely and weightily in the commercial world. Believe me, faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN. FOOTNOTES: