You may indeed, perhaps, think there is some excuse for many in this matter, just because the sin is so unconscious; that the guilt is not so great when it is unapprehended, and that it is much more pardonable to slay heedlessly than purposefully. I believe no feeling can be more mistaken, and that in reality, and in the sight of heaven; the callous indifference which pursues its own interests at any cost of life, though it does not definitely adopt the purpose of sin, is a state of mind at once more heinous and more hopeless than the wildest aberrations of ungoverned passion. There may be, in the last case, some elements of good and of redemption still mingled in the character; but, in the other, few or none. There may be hope for the man who has slain his enemy in anger; hope even for the man who has betrayed his friend in fear; but what hope for him who trades in unregarded blood, and builds his fortune on unrepented treason? But, however this may be, and wherever you may think yourselves bound in justice to impute the greater sin, be assured that the question is one of responsibilities only, not of facts. The definite result of all our modern haste to be rich is assuredly, and constantly, the murder of a certain number of persons by our hands every year. I have not time to go into the details of another--on the whole, the broadest and terriblest way in which we cause the destruction of the poor--namely, the way of luxury and waste, destroying, in improvidence, what might have been the support of thousands; [Footnote: The analysis of this error will be found completely carried out in my lectures on the political economy of art. And it is an error worth analyzing; for until it is finally trodden under foot, no healthy political, economical, or moral action is _possible_ in any state. I do not say this impetuously or suddenly, for I have investigated this subject as deeply; and as long, as my own special subject of art; and the principles of political economy which I have stated in those lectures are as sure as the principles of Euclid. Foolish readers doubted their certainty, because I told them I had "never read any books on Political Economy" Did they suppose I had got my knowledge of art by reading books?] but if you follow out the subject for yourselves at home--and what I have endeavoured to lay before you to-night will only be useful to you if you do--you will find that wherever and whenever men are endeavouring to _make money hastily_, and to avoid the labour which Providence has appointed to be tho only source of honourable profit;--and also wherever and whenever they permit themselves to _spend it luxuriously_, without reflecting how far they are misguiding the labour of others;--there and then, in either case, they are literally and infallibly causing, for their own benefit or their own pleasure, a certain annual number of human deaths; that, therefore, the choice given to every man born into this world is, simply, whether