These second and third reasons for interest then, assigned by Professor Fawcett, have evidently nothing whatever to do with the question. What I want to know is, why the Bank of England is paying me 1,200l. a year. It certainly does not pay me for superintendence. And so far from receiving my dividend as compensation for risk, I put my money into the bank because I thought it exactly the safest place to put it in. But nobody can be more anxious than I to find it proper that I should have 1,200l. a year. Finding two of Mr. Fawcett's reasons fail me utterly, I cling with tenacity to the third, and hope the best from it. The third, or first,--and now too sorrowfully the last--of the Professor's reasons, is this, that my 1,200l. are given me as "the reward of abstinence." It strikes me, upon this, that if I had not my 15,000l. of Bank Stock I should be a good deal more abstinent than I am, and that nobody would then talk of rewarding me for it. It might be possible to find even cases of very prolonged and painful abstinence, for which no reward has yet been adjudged by less abstinent England. Abstinence may, indeed, have its reward, nevertheless; but not by increase of what we abstain from, unless there be a law of growth for it, unconnected with our abstinence. "You cannot have your cake and eat it." Of course not; and if you don't eat it, you have your cake; but not a cake and a half! Imagine the complex trial of schoolboy minds, if the law of nature about cakes were, that if you ate none of your cake to-day, you would have ever so much bigger a cake to-morrow!--which is Mr. Fawcett's notion of the law of nature about money; and, alas, many a man's beside,--it being no law of nature whatever, but absolutely contrary to all her laws, and not to be enacted by the whole force of united mankind. Not a cake and a quarter to-morrow, dunce, however abstinent you are--only the cake you have,--if the mice don't get at it in the night. Interest, then, is not, it appears, payment for labour; it is not reward for risk; it is not reward for abstinence. What is it? One of two things it is;--taxation, or usury. Of which in my next letter. Meantime believe me Faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN. FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER XIX. Verona, 18th June, 1872. My Friends, What an age of progress it is, by help of advertisements! No wonder you put some faith in them, friends. In summer one's work is necessarily much before breakfast; so, coming home tired to-day, I order a steak, with which is served to me a bottle of "Moutarde Diaphane," from Bordeaux.