He is thinking, considering, calculating, and anxious.  The child is philosophising, while philosophers, excited by wine or perhaps by female society, are babbling like children.  If he asks questions I decline to answer and put him off to another day.  He becomes impatient, he forgets to eat and drink, he longs to get away from table and talk as he pleases.  What an object of curiosity, what a text for instruction.  Nothing has so far succeeded in corrupting his healthy reason; what will he think of luxury when he finds that every quarter of the globe has been ransacked, that some 2,000,000 men have laboured for years, that many lives have perhaps been sacrificed, and all to furnish him with fine clothes to be worn at midday and laid by in the wardrobe at night.

Be sure you observe what private conclusions he draws from all his observations.  If you have watched him less carefully than I suppose, his thoughts may be tempted in another direction; he may consider himself a person of great importance in the world, when he sees so much labour concentrated on the preparation of his dinner.  If you suspect his thoughts will take this direction you can easily prevent it, or at any rate promptly efface the false impression.  As yet he can only appropriate things by personal enjoyment, he can only judge of their fitness or unfitness by their outward effects.  Compare a plain rustic meal, preceded by exercise, seasoned by hunger, freedom, and delight, with this magnificent but tedious repast.  This will suffice to make him realise that he has got no real advantage from the splendour of the feast, that his stomach was as well satisfied when he left the table of the peasant, as when he left the table of the banker; from neither had he gained anything he could really call his own.

Just fancy what a tutor might say to him on such an occasion.  Consider the two dinners and decide for yourself which gave you most pleasure, which seemed the merriest, at which did you eat and drink most heartily, which was the least tedious and required least change of courses?  Yet note the difference—­this black bread you so enjoy is made from the peasant’s own harvest; his wine is dark in colour and of a common kind, but wholesome and refreshing; it was made in his own vineyard; the cloth is made of his own hemp, spun and woven in the winter by his wife and daughters and the maid; no hands but theirs have touched the food.  His world is bounded by the nearest mill and the next market.  How far did you enjoy all that the produce of distant lands and the service of many people had prepared for you at the other dinner?  If you did not get a better meal, what good did this wealth do you? how much of it was made for you?  Had you been the master of the house, the tutor might say, it would have been of still less use to you; for the anxiety of displaying your enjoyment before the eyes of others would have robbed you of it; the pains would be yours, the pleasure theirs.