Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground;—that you can’t have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders. Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has ‘Dorset’ butter. [69] If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train. Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College card,’ of “eighteen useful articles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence. What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness! Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream have they to their tea?