“It is not probable that the majority of your readers understood you either to mean literally what you said, or to mean nothing but jest? They would naturally ask themselves, ‘Must it be a tenth of both, or nothing?’ ‘A tenth of either?’ Or, ‘After all, only what we feel able to give?’ Their perplexity would lead to the giving of nothing. As nobody who has a pecuniary title to ask for an explanation appears to have called your attention to the subject, I, who have no such title, do so now,—feeling impelled thereto by the hint in this month’s ‘Fors’ of the possible ‘non-continuance of the work.’ “May I presume to add one word more? Last Monday’s ‘Times’ (March 17th) gave a report of a Working Men’s Meeting on the present political crisis. One of the speakers said ‘he wanted every working man to be free.’ And his idea of freedom he explained to be that all workmen should be at liberty ‘to leave their work at a moment’s notice.’ This, as I have reason to know, is one of the things which working men have got into their heads, and which the newspapers ‘get their living by asserting.’ “Lastly, the present English notion of civilizing China by inches, may be worth keeping record of. “We have Philistines out here, and a Philistine out here is a perfect Goliath. When he imagines that anything is wrong, he says—let it be a Coolie or an Emperor—‘Give him a thrashing.’ The men of this class here propose their usual remedy: ‘Let us have a war, and give the Chinese a good licking, and then we shall have the audience question granted, and everything else will follow.’ This includes opening up the country for trade, and civilizing the people, which according to their theories can be best done by ‘thrashing them.’ The missionaries are working to civilize the people here in another way, that is by the usual plan of tracts and preaching; but their system is not much in favour, for they make such very small progress among the 360,000,000, the conversion of which is their problem. The man of business wants the country opened up to trade, wants manufactures introduced, the mineral wealth to be used, and generally speaking the resources of the country to be developed, ‘and that sort of thing you know—that’s the real way to civilize them.’ This, of course, implies a multitudinous breed of Mr. Ruskin’s demons, or machinery, to accomplish all this. I am here giving the tone of the ideas I hear expressed around me. It was only the other day that I heard some of these various points talked over. We were sailing on the river in a steam launch, which was making the air impure with its smoke, snorting in a high-pressure way, and whistling as steam launches are wont to do. The scene was appropriate to the conversation, for we were among a forest of great junks—most quaint and picturesque they looked—so old-fashioned they seemed, that Noah’s Ark, had it been there, would have had a much more modern look about it. My friend, to