I do not see on what principle Mr. Greg would justify, if he does justify, any sort of charitable benefactions. Did not Mr. Peabody give his glass of champagne to a man in need? He might have spent all his money on himself if he had been driven to building Chatsworths, and hanging their walls with Raffaelles. How will he escape the reproach of having done what was criminal and pernicious? And what are we to say of the conduct of London plutocrats who abetted his proceedings by their applause though they abstained from following his example? Is there any apology for them at all but one essentially Christian? Not that Christianity makes any great fuss over munificence, or gives political economy reasonable ground for apprehension on that score. Plutocracy deifies Mr. Peabody; Christianity measures him and pronounces his millions worth less than the widow's mite. In my lecture I have applied my principles, or tried to apply them, fairly to the mechanic as well as to the millionaire. I have deprecated, as immoral, a resort to strikes solely in the interest of the strikers, without regard to the general interests of industry and of the community at large. What has my critic to say, from the moral point of view, to the gas stokers who leave London in the dark, or the colliers who, in struggling to raise their own wages, condemn the ironworkers to "clamm" for want of coal? I would venture to suggest that Mr. Greg somewhat overrates in his paper the beneficence of luxury as an agent in the advancement of civilization. "Artificial wants," he says, "what may be termed extravagant wants, the wish to possess something beyond the bare necessaries of existence; the taste for superfluities and luxuries first, the desire for refinements and embellishments next; the craving for the higher enjoyments of intellect and art as the final stage--these are the sources and stimulants of advancing civilization. It is these desires, these needs, which raise mankind above mere animal existence, which, in time and gradually, transform the savage into the cultured citizen of intelligence and leisure. Ample food once obtained, he begins to long for better, more varied, more succulent food; the richer nutriment leads on to the well-stored larder and the well-filled cellar, and culminates in the French cook." The love of truth, the love of beauty, the effort to realize a high type of individual character, and a high social ideal, surely these are elements of progress distinct from gastronomy, and from that special chain of gradual improvement which culminates in the French cook. It may be doubted whether French cookery does always denote the acme of civilization. Perhaps in the case of the typical London Alderman, it denotes something like the acme of barbarism, for the barbarism of the elaborate and expensive glutton surely exceeds that of the child of nature who gorges himself on the flesh which he has taken in hunting: not to mention that the child of