Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it.  On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately-sized park; a large garden and hot-houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family; always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself.  At the bottom of the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long, with a steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high.  In this mill are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language.

Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of thing you propose to yourselves?  It is very pretty indeed seen from above; not at all so pretty, seen from below.  For, observe, while to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting-on, to a thousand families she is the Goddess of not Getting-on.  “Nay,” you say, “they have all their chance.”  Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must always be the same number of blanks.  “Ah! but in a lottery it is not skill and intelligence which take the lead, but blind chance.”  What then! do you think the old practice, that “they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,"[221] is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist? and that, though we may not take advantage of a child’s or a woman’s weakness, we may of a man’s foolishness?  “Nay, but finally, work must be done, and some one must be at the top, some one at the bottom.”  Granted, my friends.  Work must always be, and captains of work must always be; and if you in the least remember the tone of any of my writings, you must know that they are thought unfit for this age, because they are always insisting on need of government, and speaking with scorn of liberty.  But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it.  It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins; (if it fight for treasure or land;) neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation’s work.  Real kings, on the contrary, are known invariably by their doing quite the reverse of this,—­by their taking the least possible quantity of the nation’s work for themselves.  There is no test of real kinghood so infallible as that.  Does the crowned creature live simply, bravely, unostentatiously? probably