First he defends pleasure grounds, gardens, shrubberies and deer parks. But he defends them on the ground that they are good things for the community and thereby admits my principle. It is only against wasteful self indulgence that I have anything to say. No doubt, says Mr. Greg, if the land of a country is all occupied and cultivated, and if no more land is easily accessible, and if the produce of other lands is not procurable in return for manufactured articles of exchange, then a proprietor who shall employ a hundred acres in growing wine for his own drinking, which might or would otherwise be employed in growing wheat or other food for twenty poor families who can find no other field for their labour, may fairly be said to be consuming, spending on himself, the sustenance of those families. If, again, he, in the midst of a swarming population unable to find productive or remunerative occupation, insists upon keeping a considerable extent of ground in merely ornamental walks and gardens, and, therefore, useless as far as the support of human life is concerned, he may be held liable to the same imputation--even though the wages he pays to the gardeners in the one case, and the vine-dressers in the other, be pleaded in mitigation of the charge. Let the writer of this only allow, as he must, that the moral, social and political consequences of expenditure are to be taken into account as well as the economical consequences, and he will be entirely at one with the writer whom he supposes himself to be confuting. I have never said, or imagined, that "all land ought to be producing food." I hold that no land in England is better employed than that of the London parks and the gardens of the Crystal Palace, though I could not speak so confidently with regard to a vast park from which all are excluded but its owner. Mr. Greg here again takes up what seems to me the strange position that to condemn excess is to condemn moderation. He says that whatever is said against the great parks and gardens of the most luxurious millionaire may equally be said against a tradesman's little flower-garden, or the plot of ornamental ground before the cottage windows of a peasant. I must again say that, so far from regarding this argument as irrefutable, I altogether fail to discover its cogency. The tradesman's little bit of green, the peasant's flower- bed, are real necessities of a human soul. Can the same thing be said of a pleasure-ground which consumes the labour of twenty men, and of which the object is not to refresh the weariness of labour but to distract the vacancy of idleness?