“Have the Arkwrights and Stephensons, then, done nothing but harm?” Nothing; but the root of all the mischief is not in Arkwrights or Stephensons; nor in rogues or mechanics. The real root of it is the crime of the squire himself. And the method of that crime is thus. A certain quantity of the food produced by the country is paid annually by it into the squire’s hand, in the form of rent, privately, and taxes, publicly. If he uses this food to support a food-producing population, he increases daily the strength of the country and his own; but if he uses it to support an idle population, or one producing merely trinkets in iron, or gold, or other rubbish he steadily weakens the country, and debases himself. Now the action of the squire for the last fifty years has been, broadly, to take the food from the ground of his estate, and carry it to London, where he feeds with it [47] a vast number of builders, upholsterers, (one of them charged me five pounds for a footstool the other day,) carriage and harness makers, dress-makers, grooms, footmen, bad musicians, bad painters, gamblers, and harlots, and in supply of the wants of these main classes, a vast number of shopkeepers of minor useless articles. The muscles and the time of this enormous population being wholly unproductive—(for of course time spent in the mere process of sale is unproductive, and much more that of the footman and groom, while that of the vulgar upholsterer, jeweller, fiddler, and painter, etc., etc., is not only unproductive, but mischievous,)—the entire mass of this London population do nothing whatever either to feed or clothe themselves; and their vile life preventing them from all rational entertainment, they are compelled to seek some pastime in a vile literature, the demand for which again occupies another enormous class, who do nothing to feed or dress themselves; finally, the vain disputes of this vicious population give employment to the vast industry of the lawyers and their clerks, [48] who similarly do nothing to feed or dress themselves.