enough to attract rather a superfluity than a lack of candidates; but when the number of candidates is greater than a certain ratio, the salaries are reduced, whilst a threatened lack of candidates is met by an increase of salaries. I will add, that it is to be taken as a matter of course that in Freeland the unsuccessful candidates are not breadless aspirants. Success or failure is never therefore a question of a livelihood, but of the gratification of inclination and sometimes of vanity. A man gives up his office when more profitable or more agreeable occupation attracts him elsewhere. The public officials are not paid the same salaries in all the branches of the public service. Specially trying work, or work demanding special knowledge, obtains here higher profits, just as in the various industries. And whilst the labour-earnings of ordinary manual labour are the measure of the salaries of the lower officials, so do the salaries of the various association-managers exercise a regulative influence upon the salaries of the higher public officials. You, also, have often experienced that the attractions of positions connected with public activity have in no small degree brought down the salaries of government officials, professors, &c., below the level of the incomes of those who hold the chief posts in associations. As a rule, it is found that with a rise in the general level of intelligence there is a _relative_--by no means an absolute--sinking of the higher salaries. While the directors of several large associations receive as much as 5,000 hour-equivalents a year, the highest officials in the Freeland central government at the present time receive only 3,600 more, and that because our persistent assertion of the relative depreciation of the higher salaries is met by the parliaments with an equally persistent resistance, and the parliaments yield to our importunities only very slowly and very reluctantly. To be just, it should be added that the same game is repeated in the associations. The directors would often be satisfied with much lower salaries, for they often really do not know what to do with their incomes, which, in comparison with prices in Freeland, are in some cases exorbitant, and increase with every increase in the value of labour. Particularly during the last decade, since the value of the hour-equivalent has increased so much, proposals from above to reduce salaries have become a standing rule. I repeat, this reduction must be understood to be merely relative--that is, to refer merely to the number of hour-equivalents. The value of a labour-hour has quadrupled within the last twenty years; those of us, therefore--we public officials, for example--who receive twenty-eight per cent. fewer hour-equivalents than we did originally, still have incomes which, when reckoned in money, have been nearly tripled. As a rule, however, the associations will not hear of even such a reduction.