_Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Really, Forester, you are a very singular fellow. I should not much mind what you say, if you had not such a strange habit of practising what you preach; a thing quite unprecedented, and, egad, preposterous. I cannot think where you got it: I am sure you did not learn it at college. _Mr. Fax._ In a political light, every object of perception may be resolved into one of these three heads: the food consumed—the consumers—and money. In this point of view all convertible property that does not eat and drink is money. Diamonds are money. When a man changes a bank-note for a diamond, he merely changes one sort of money for another, differing only in the facility of circulation and the stability of value. None of the produce of the earth is wasted by the permutation. _Mr. Forester._ The most pernicious species of luxury, therefore, is that which applies the fruits of the earth to any other purposes than those of human subsistence. All luxury is indeed pernicious, because its infallible tendency is to enervate the few and enslave the many; but luxury, which, in addition to this evil tendency, destroys the fruits of the earth in the wantonness of idle ostentation, and thereby prevents the existence of so many human beings as the quantity of food so destroyed would maintain, is marked by criminality of a much deeper dye. _Mr. Fax._ At the same time you must consider that, in respect of population, the great desideratum is not number, but quality. If the whole surface of this country were divided into gardens, and in every garden were a cottage, and in every cottage a family living entirely on potatoes, the number of its human inhabitants would be much greater than at present; but where would be the spirit of commercial enterprise, the researches of science, the exalted pursuits of philosophical leisure, the communication with distant lands, and all that variety of human life and intercourse, which is now so beautiful and interesting? Above all, where would be the refuge of such a population in times of the slightest defalcation? Now, the waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity. The canal that does not overflow in the season of rain will not be navigable in the season of drought. The rich have been often ready, in days of emergency, to lay their superfluities aside; but when the fruits of the earth are applied in plentiful or even ordinary seasons, to the utmost possibility of human subsistence, the days of deficiency in their produce must be days of inevitable famine. _Mr. Forester._ What then will you say of those who in times of actual famine persevere in their old course, in the wanton waste of luxury? _Mr. Fax._ Truly I have nothing to say for them but that they know not what they do.