"Strengthen authority," "enforce discipline"! What ugly expressions these! and a "whole hamlet," though it be a little one, "the property of the Edgeworths"! How long are such things yet to be? thinks my Republican correspondent, I suppose--from whom, to my regret, I have had no further dispatch since I endeavoured to answer his interrogations. [18] Only, note further respecting this chief question of the right of private property, that there are two kinds of ownership, which the Greeks wisely expressed in two different ways: the first, with the word which brought me to a pause in St. John's Gospel, 'idios,' signifying the way, for instance, in which a man's opinions and interests are his own; 'idia,' so that by persisting in them, independently of the truth, which is above opinion, and of the public interest, which is above private, he becomes what we very properly, borrowing the Greek word, call an 'idiot.' But their other phrase expresses the kind of belonging which is nobly won, and is truly and inviolably ours, in which sense a man may learn the full meaning of the word 'Mine' only once in his life,--happy he who has ever so learnt it. I was thinking over the prettiness of the word in that sense, a day or two ago, and opening a letter, mechanically, when a newspaper clipping dropped out of it (I don't know from what paper), containing a quotation from the 'Cornhill Magazine' setting forth the present privileges of the agricultural labourer attained for him by modern improvements in machinery, in the following terms:-- "An agricultural labourer, from forty to forty-five years of age, of tried skill, of probity, and sobriety, with £200 in his pocket, is a made man. True, he has had to forego the luxury of marriage; but so have his betters." And I think you may be grateful to the Third Fors for this clipping; which you see settles, in the region of Cornhill, at least, the question whether you are the betters or the worses of your masters. Decidedly the worses, according to the 'Cornhill.' Also, exactly the sum which my old nurse had for her reward at the end of her life, is, you see, to be the agricultural labourer's reward in the crowning triumph of his;--provided always that he has followed the example of his betters on the stock exchange and in trade, in the observance of the strictest probity;--that he be entirely skilful;--not given to purchasing two shillings' worth of liquor for twenty-seven and sixpence,--and finally, until the age of forty-five, has dispensed with the luxury of marriage. I have just said I didn't want to make Catholics of you; but truly I think your Protestantism is becoming too fierce in its opposition to the Popedom. Cannot it be content with preaching the marriage of the clergy, but it must preach also the celibacy of the laity?