You intend to do your duty manfully and impartially? Of course, Dick, you do. Nobody who has the pleasure of your acquaintance can doubt it. Your virility is beyond all dispute, and how can you be otherwise than impartial when you are writing up your own side? You are not much of a lawyer, perhaps, but common sense will suggest the first plain rules for leading evidence. Your employers want to show that everybody is prospering under the cheerful influences of free trade. They don't, of course, care twopence halfpenny whether their dogma is right or wrong: they are committed to it, and that is enough. They give you a certain allowance per week--I hope, by the way, it is a handsome one--to prosecute your inquiries, and they intend that the results shall be such as to justify their general assertion. And no doubt they will justify it, Dick; for I say, and I care not who knows it, that a cleverer, sharper, more acute and knowing dog than yourself never dipped goose-quill into a standish. You need not blush at the compliment. Was it not you who wrote that leader last week, recommending the agriculturists to regulate their operations on the same principle which is followed in the factories, and to look to short and speedy returns as the best means of making money? Ha, ha, ha! Dick--that certainly was a masterpiece! How the poor devils of chaw-bacons must have stared when they heard you gravely recommending them to raise three or four consecutive crops in the year, to turn the seasons topsy-turvy, and to sow in August that they might reap in January! No wonder that they are angry, for the best of the joke is, that a number of people believed you. The Cockneys have got it into their heads that wheat can be grown by machinery, and I, for one, shan't be in any hurry to disabuse them. If I were you, I would give them another leader or two in the same strain, insisting of course that the agriculturists are a pack of infernal asses, who don't understand the first principles of their own trade, and that Mechi, the razor-man, is their only creditable apostle.