And truly to all wholesome deed here in England, the chances of prosperity are few, and the distinctness of adversity only conquerable by fixed imagination and exhaustless patience—‘Adversis rerum immersabilis undis.’ The wisest men join with the fools, and the best men with the villains, to prevent, if they may, any good thing being done permanently—nay, to provoke and applaud the doing of consistently evil things permanently. To establish a national debt, and in the most legal terms—how easy! To establish a national store, under any legal or moral conditions of perpetuity—how difficult! Every one calls me mad for so much as hoping to do so. ‘This looks like a charity, this educating of peasants,’ said the good lawyer, who drew up the already published conditional form of association. ‘You must not establish a fund for charity; it is sure to lead to all sorts of abuses, and get into wrong hands.’ Well, yes—it in merely human probability may. I do verily perceive and admit, in convinced sorrow, that I live in the midst of a nation of thieves and murderers; [62] that everybody around me is trying to rob everybody else; and that, not bravely and strongly, but in the most cowardly and loathsome ways of lying trade; that ‘Englishman’ is now merely another word for black-leg and swindler; and English honour and courtesy changed to the sneaking and the smiles of a whipped pedlar, an inarticulate Autolycus, with a steam hurdy-gurdy instead of a voice. Be this all so; be it so to the heart’s content—or liver and gall’s content—of every modern economist and philosopher. I yet do verily trust that out of this festering mass of scum of the earth, and miserable coagulation of frog-spawn soaked in ditch-water, I can here and there pluck up some drowned honour by the locks, and leave written orders for wholesome deed, and collected monies for the doing thereof, which will be obeyed and guarded after I am gone; and will by no means fall into the power of the mendicant tribe who, too cowardly and heartless to beg from the face of the living, steal the alms of the dead, and unite the apparently inconsistent characters of beggar and thief, seasoning the compound with sacrilege. Little by little, if my life is spared to me, therefore, (and if I die, there will I doubt not be raised up some one else in my room)—little by little, I or they will get monies and lands together; handful gleaned after handful; field joined to field, and landmarks set which no man shall dare hereafter remove. And over those fields of ours the winds of Heaven shall be pure; and upon them, the work of men shall be done in honour and truth.