Nor can it be less encouraging to you to see how, with a sufficiently curative quantity of Liberty, you may defend yourselves against all danger of over-production, especially in art; but, in case you should ever wish to re-'produce' any of the combustibles (as oil, or canvas) used in these Parisian Economies, you will do well to inquire of the author of the "Essay on Liberty" whether he considers oil of linseed, or petroleum, as best fulfilling his definition, "utilities fixed and embodied in material objects." FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER VII. Denmark Hill, 1st July, 1871. My Friends, It seldom chances, my work lying chiefly among stones, clouds, and flowers, that I am brought into any freedom of intercourse with my fellow-creatures; but since the fighting in Paris I have dined out several times, and spoken to the persons who sat next me, and to others when I went upstairs; and done the best I could to find out what people thought about the fighting, or thought they ought to think about it, or thought they ought to say. I had, of course, no hope of finding any one thinking what they ought to do. But I have not yet, a little to my surprise, met with any one who either appeared to be sadder, or professed himself wiser, for anything that has happened. It is true that I am neither sadder nor wiser, because of it, myself. But then I was so sad before, that nothing could make me sadder; and getting wiser has always been to me a very slow process,--(sometimes even quite stopping for whole days together),--so that if two or three new ideas fall in my way at once, it only puzzles me; and the fighting in Paris has given me more than two or three. The newest of all these new ones, and, in fact, quite a glistering and freshly minted idea to me, is the Parisian notion of Communism, as far as I understand it, (which I don't profess to do altogether, yet, or I should be wiser than I was, with a vengeance). For, indeed, I am myself a Communist of the old school--reddest also of the red; and was on the very point of saying so at the end of my last letter; only the telegram about the Louvre's being on fire stopped me, because I thought the Communists of the new school, as I could not at all understand them, might not quite understand me. For we Communists of the old school think that our property belongs to everybody, and everybody's property to us; so of course I thought the Louvre belonged to me as much as to the Parisians, and expected they would have sent word over to me, being an Art Professor, to ask whether I wanted it burnt down. But no message or intimation to that effect ever reached me.