135. You see that I have already much diminished the number of employments involving degradation; and raised the character of many of those that are left. There remain to be considered the necessarily painful or mechanical works of mining, forging, and the like: the unclean, noisome, or paltry manufactures--the various kinds of transport--(by merchant shipping, etc.) and the conditions of menial service. It will facilitate the examination of these if we put them for the moment aside, and pass to the other division of our dilemma, the question, namely, what kind of lives our gentlemen and ladies are to live, for whom all this hard work is to be done. LETTER XXII. OF THE NORMAL POSITION AND DUTIES OF THE UPPER CLASSES. GENERAL STATEMENT OF THE LAND QUESTION. _April 17, 1867._ 136. In passing now to the statement of conditions affecting the interests of the upper classes, I would rather have addressed these closing letters to one of themselves than to you, for it is with their own faults and needs that each class is primarily concerned. As, however, unless I kept the letters private, this change of their address would be but a matter of courtesy and form, not of any true prudential use; and as besides I am now no more inclined to reticence--prudent or otherwise; but desire only to state the facts of our national economy as clearly and completely as may be, I pursue the subject without respect of persons. 137. Before examining what the occupation and estate of the upper classes ought, as far as may reasonably be conjectured, finally to become, it will be well to set down in brief terms what they actually have been in past ages: for this, in many respects, they must also always be. The upper classes, broadly speaking, are originally composed of the best-bred (in the mere animal sense of the term), the most energetic, and most thoughtful, of the population, who either by strength of arm seize the land from the rest, and make slaves of them, or bring desert land into cultivation, over which they have therefore, within certain limits, true personal right; or, by industry, accumulate other property, or by choice devote themselves to intellectual pursuits, and, though poor, obtain an acknowledged superiority of position, shown by benefits conferred in discovery, or in teaching, or in gifts of art. This is all in the simple course of the law of nature; and the proper offices of the upper classes, thus distinguished from the rest, become, therefore, in the main threefold:-- 138. (A) Those who are strongest of arm have for their proper function the restraint and punishment of vice, and the general maintenance of law and order; releasing only from its original subjection to their power that which truly deserves to be emancipated.