It strikes us that the writer of this article is not true to his own principle in his view of the duties of the employer. We readily grant the duty of making his business prosperous and his workshops healthy. To fail in the latter particular especially, were not merely to fail in a duty, but to incur a heavy positive blame. But we cannot see how it is incumbent on the employer to provide houses for the persons who enter into the labour-contract with him, any more than to see that they get their four-pound loaf of a certain quality or price. It may be a graceful thing, a piece of noble benevolence, to enter into these building schemes, but it is also to go back into that system of vassalage out of which it is assumed that the relation of employer and employed is passing. Either the new buildings will pay as speculations, or they will not. If they are sure to pay, ordinary speculators will be as ready to furnish them as bakers are to sell bread. If the contrary be the case, why burden with the actual or probable loss the party in a simple contract which involves no such obligation? Clearly, there must be no great reason to expect a fair return for capital laid out in this way, or we should see building schemes for the working-classes taken up extensively by ordinary speculators. For employers, then, to enter into such plans, must in some degree be the result of benevolent feelings towards their men; and, so far, we must hold there is an acknowledgment on both sides that the system of vassalage is not yet extinct amongst us, and that the time for its extinction is not yet come.