These details about the present day of small things, about this remnant of an ancient hope, are not themselves important, but may not be without interest to some of the many thousand readers of _Fors Clavigera_. Those letters are full more of promise and of postponement than of achievement or permanently established method; and the rather wilful and fantastic adventures of a mind that was seldom at rest, often overflow into the monthly budget without as much repression as a sober systematizer would have exercised, but with endless delight. In the early hopeful days, when there floated before Ruskin’s imagination the conception of an influential and numerous body of Companions of the Guild, comprising the moral and intellectual aristocracy of the country, he laid his plans on large lines. In the Master’s Report for 1881 he wrote that he expected “the Guild to extend its operations over the Continent of Europe and number its members ultimately by myriads”; which in the mouth of a Greek scholar means accurately by tens of thousands. He instructed the Companions to read no newspapers until he should be able to found a newspaper fit for them to read, an instruction which his most devout follower has never obeyed. Moreover there was to be an authorized list of books which alone might be read, of which _Bibliotheca Pastorum_ was the first part. This is perhaps the most erratic of all the proposals which crossed his mind. He also criticized the coinage of the country, and insisted that there should be under the rule of St. George sovereigns called ducats, of pure gold, a metal which is of itself quite unsuited for use as coinage, and needs to be hardened by alloy before it is fit for the purposes of the mint. Then the shilling was to be called a florin and was to be divided into ten pence. This copying of the coins of Florence in the middle ages, which as Ruskin once said to me, gave her merchants credit in the time of Edward I, cannot be considered seriously; indeed, these fanciful commands can only be matter for regret. There can be but one coinage in a country, even if the Guild of St. George had become a large institution. So late as 1884 Mr. Ruskin told a party of us at Brantwood that the St. George’s Company was going to issue coins of pure gold. Rents, payable of course to the State, were to be one-tenth of the produce. Now rents cannot with any justice be settled that way. The farmer who farms poor land should be as well off and get as good a return for his labour as he who farms rich land. Under ordinary competition things turn out that way. All farmers in theory, and approximately in practice, receive the same return for labour and capital applied to land, and the margin goes to the landlord as rent.