"7. 'Untrue.' Untrue. Lord Somebody consumes, with the aid of a hundred men and women, whom he keeps from productive industry, as much as would suffice to maintain a hundred families. A hundred--yes, a thousand navvies. 'Destroying'? Did you forget that so many admirals, generals, colonels, and captains, were your law-makers? Are they not professional destroyers? I could fill your pages with a list of other destructive employments of your legislators. "8. Has the tax gatherer too busy a time of it to attend to the duties added by the establishment of a National Post Office? We remove a thousand toll-bars, and collect the assessment annually with economy. We eat now, and are poisoned, and pay dearly. The buyers and sellers of bread 'have a busy time of it.' "9. Thank you for the straightforwardness. But I find you ask me what I mean by a 'State.' I meant it as you accepted it, and did not think it economical to bother you or myself with a page of incomplete definitions. "10. 'See Munera Pulveris!' And, ye 'workmen and labourers,' go and consult the Emperor of China. "You speak of a king who killed 'without wrath, and without doubting his rightness,' and of a collier who killed with 'consciousness.' Glorious, ignorant brute of a king! Degraded, enlightened collier! It is enough to stimulate a patriot to burn all the colleges and libraries. Much learning makes us ignoble! No! it is the much labour and the bad teaching of the labourer by those who never earned their food by the sweat of their own brow." FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER XXX. Brantwood, April 19, 1873. On the thirteenth shelf of the south bookcase of my home-library, stand, first, Kenelm Digby's 'Broad Stone of Honour,' then in five volumes, bound in red, the 'History of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha;' and then, in one volume, bound in green, a story no less pathetic, called the 'Mirror of Peasants.' Its author does not mean the word 'mirror' to be understood in the sense in which one would call Don Quixote the 'Mirror of Chivalry;' but in that of a glass in which a man--beholding his natural heart--may know also the hearts of other men, as, in a glass, face answers to face. The author of this story was a clergyman; but employed the greater part of his day in writing novels, having a gift for that species of composition as well as for sermons, and observing, though he gave both excellent in their kind, that his congregation liked their sermons to be short, and his readers, their novels to be long.