You don’t know, you answer, how to make a brick, a tile, or a pot; or how to build a dyke, or drive a stake that will stand. No more do I. Our education has to begin;—mine as much as yours. I have indeed, the newspapers say, a power of expression; but as they also say I cannot think at all, you see I have nothing to express; so that peculiar power, according to them, is of no use to me whatever. But you don’t want to make your bricks yourself; you want to have them made for you by the United Grand Junction Limited Liability Brick-without-Straw Company, paying twenty-five per cent. to its idle shareholders? Well, what will you do, yourself, then? Nothing? Or do you mean to play on the fiddle to the Company making your bricks? What will you do—of this first work necessary for your life? There’s nothing but digging and cooking now remains to be done. Will you dig, or cook? Dig, by all means; but your house should be ready for you first. Your wife should cook. What else can you do? Preach?—and give us your precious opinions of God and His ways! Yes, and in the meanwhile I am to build your house, am I? and find you a barrel-organ, or a harmonium, to twangle psalm-tunes on, I suppose? Fight—will you?—and pull other people’s houses down; while I am to be set to build your barracks, that you may go smoking and spitting about all day, with a cockscomb on your head, and spurs to your heels?—(I observe, by the way, the Italian soldiers have now got cocks’ tails on their heads, instead of cocks’ combs.)—Lay down the law to me in a wig,—will you? and tell me the house I have built is—NOT mine? and take my dinner from me, as a fee for that opinion? Build, my man,—build, or dig,—one of the two; and then eat your honestly-earned meat, thankfully, and let other people alone, if you can’t help them. NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE. The points suggested by the letter printed in the Fors of September, respecting the minor action of English Magistracy, must still be kept for subsequent consideration, our to-day’s work having been too general to reach them. I have an interesting letter from a man of business, remonstrating with me on my declaration that railroads should no more pay dividends than carriage roads, or field footpaths. He is a gentle man of business, and meshed, as moderately well-meaning people, nowadays, always are, in a web of equivocation between what is profitable and benevolent.