cheapness of everything that is material in books. I please myself with the reflection that even you make paper cheaper by manufacturing so much cotton. All these are reasons why we ought not to be jealous of you; and now permit me to indicate a few other reasons why it is unreasonable on your part to feel any jealousy of us. Suppose we were to cease working to-morrow--cease working, I mean, in our peculiar ways--and all of us become colliers and factory operatives instead, with nobody to supply our places. Or, since you may possibly be of opinion that there is enough literature and science in the world at the present day, suppose rather that at some preceding date the whole literary and scientific and artistic labor of the human race; had come suddenly to a standstill. Mind, I do not say of Englishmen merely, but of the whole race, for if any intellectual work had been done in France or Germany, or even in Japan, you would have imported it like cotton and foreign cereals. Well, I have no hesitation in telling you that although there was a good deal of literature and science in England before the 1st of January, 1800, the present condition of the nation would have been a very chaotic condition if the intellectual class had ceased on that day to think and observe and to place on record its thoughts and observations. The life of a progressive nation cannot long go forward exclusively on the thinking of the past: its thoughtful men must not be all dead men, but living men who accompany it on its course. It is they who make clear the lessons of experience; it is they who discover the reliable general laws upon which all safe action must be founded in the future; it is they who give decision to human action in every direction by constantly registering, in language of comprehensive accuracy, both its successes and its failures. It is their great and arduous labor which makes knowledge accessible to men of action at the cost of little effort and the smallest possible expenditure of time. The intellectual class grows in numbers and in influence along with the numbers and influence of the materially productive population of the State. And not only are the natural philosophers, the writers of contemporary and past history, the discoverers in science, _necessary_ in the strictest sense to the life of such a community as the modern English community, but even the poets, the novelists, the artists are necessary to the perfection of its life. Without them and their work the national mind would be as incomplete as would be the natural universe without beauty. But this, perhaps, you will perceive less clearly, or be less willing to admit. LETTER V. TO A YOUNG ETONIAN WHO THOUGHT OF BECOMING A COTTON-SPINNER.