Then, also, I have some houses in Marylebone, which though indeed very ugly and miserable, yet, so far as they are actual beams and brick-bats put into shape, I might have imagined to be real property; only, you know, Mr. Mill says that people who build houses don't produce a commodity, but only do us a service. So I suppose my houses are not "utilities embodied in material objects" (and indeed they don't look much like it); but I know I have the right to keep anybody from living in them unless they pay me; only suppose some day the Irish faith, that people ought to be lodged for nothing, should become an English one also--where would my money be? Where is it now, except as a chronic abstraction from other people's earnings? So again, I have some land in Yorkshire--some Bank "Stock" (I don't in the least know what that is)--and the like; but whenever I examine into these possessions, I find they melt into one or another form of future taxation, and that I am always sitting (if I were working I shouldn't mind, but I am only sitting) at the receipt of Custom, and a Publican as well as a sinner. And then, to embarrass the business further yet, I am quite at variance with other people about the place where this money, whatever it is, comes from. The Spectator, for instance, in its article of 25th June of last year, on Mr. Goschen's "lucid and forcible speech of Friday-week," says that "the country is once more getting rich, and the money is filtering downwards to the actual workers." But whence, then, did it filter down to us, the actual idlers? This is really a question very appropriate for April. For such golden rain raineth not every day, but in a showery and capricious manner, out of heaven, upon us; mostly, as far as I can judge, rather pouring down than filtering upon idle persons, and running in thinner driblets, but I hope purer for the filtering process, to the "actual workers." But where does it come from? and in the times of drought between the showers, where does it go to? "The country is getting rich again," says the Spectator; but then, if the April clouds fail, may it get poor again? And when it again becomes poor,--when, last 25th of June, it was poor,--what becomes, or had become, of the money? Was it verily lost, or only torpid in the winter of our discontent? or was it sown and buried in corruption, to be raised in a multifold power? When we are in a panic about our money, what do we think is going to happen to it? Can no economist teach us to keep it safe after we have once got it? nor any "beloved physician"--as I read the late Sir James Simpson is called in Edinburgh--guard even our solid gold against death, or at least, fits of an apoplectic character, alarming to the family?