This last piece of impassioned young lady’s English, translated into unimpassioned old gentleman’s English, means, I suppose, that “it is very shocking, but not at all enough to make one give up wearing Valenciennes.” Nor should it be. But it should be quite enough to make one inquire into the matter; ascertain with what degree of fineness lace can be made in the open daylight and fresh air of France; request some benevolent lady friend, who has nothing else to do, to undertake the sale of such lace, with due Episcopal superintendence of the relieved workers; and buy one’s lace only from this benevolent lady-Bishop. FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER LXIX. I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by St. George in the island. I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants. And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.