LETTER LVIII.

“Deus, a quo sancta desideria, recta consilia, et justa sunt opera, da servis tuis illam quam mundus dare non potest pacem, ut et corda nostra mandatis tuis, et, hostium sublata formidine, tempora, sint tuâ protectione tranquilla.”

“God, from whom are all holy desires, right counsels, and just works, give to Thy servants that peace which the world cannot, that both our hearts, in Thy commandments, and our times, the fear of enemies being taken away, may be calm under Thy guard.”

The adulteration of this great Catholic prayer in our English church-service (as needless as it was senseless, since the pure form of it contains nothing but absolutely Christian prayer, and is as fit for the most stammering Protestant lips as for Dante’s), destroyed all the definite meaning of it,1 and left merely the vague expression of desire for peace, on quite unregarded terms. For [272]of the millions of people who utter the prayer at least weekly, there is not one in a thousand who is ever taught, or can for themselves find out, either what a holy desire means, or a right counsel means, or a just work means,—or what the world is, or what the peace is which it cannot give. And half an hour after they have insulted God by praying to Him in this deadest of all dead languages, not understanded of the people, they leave the church, themselves pacified in their perennial determination to put no check on their natural covetousness; to act on their own opinions, be they right or wrong; to do whatever they can make money by, be it just or unjust; and to thrust themselves, with the utmost of their soul and strength, to the highest, by them attainable, pinnacle of the most bedrummed and betrumpeted booth in the Fair of the World.

The prayer, in its pure text, is essentially, indeed, a monastic one; but it is written for the great Monastery of the Servants of God, whom the world hates. It cannot be uttered with honesty but by these; nor can it ever be answered but with the peace bequeathed to these, ‘not as the world giveth.’

Of which peace, the nature is not to be without war, but undisturbed in the midst of war; and not without enemies, but without fear of them. It is a peace without pain, because desiring only what is holy; without anxiety, because it thinks only what is right; without disappointment, because a just work is always successful; without [273]sorrow, because ‘great peace have they which love Thy Law, and nothing shall offend them;’ and without terror, because the God of all battles is its Guard.

So far as any living souls in the England of this day can use, understandingly, the words of this collect, they are already, consciously or not, companions of all good labourers in the vineyard of God. For those who use it reverently, yet have never set themselves to find out what the commandments of God are, nor how loveable they are, nor how far, instead of those commandments, the laws of the world are the only code they care for, nor how far they still think their own thoughts and speak their own words, it is assuredly time to search out these things. And I believe that, after having searched them out, no sincerely good and religious person would find, whatever his own particular form of belief might be, anything which he could reasonably refuse, or which he ought in anywise to fear to profess before all men, in the following statement of creed and resolution, which must be written with their own hand, and signed, with the solemnity of a vow, by every person received into the St. George’s Company.

I. I trust in the Living God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things and creatures visible and invisible. I trust in the kindness of His law, and the goodness of His work. [274] And I will strive to love Him, and keep His law, and see His work, while I live. II. I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in the majesty of its faculties, the fulness of its mercy, and the joy of its love. And I will strive to love my neighbour as myself, and, even when I cannot, will act as if I did. III. I will labour, with such strength and opportunity as God gives me, for my own daily bread; and all that my hand finds to do, I will do with my might. IV. I will not deceive, or cause to be deceived, any human being for my gain or pleasure; nor hurt, or cause to be hurt, any human being for my gain or pleasure; nor rob, or cause to be robbed, any human being for my gain or pleasure. V. I will not kill nor hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty, upon the earth. VI. I will strive to raise my own body and soul daily into higher powers of duty and happiness; not in rivalship or contention with others, but for the help, delight, and honour of others, and for the joy and peace of my own life. VII. I will obey all the laws of my country faithfully; and the orders of its monarch, and of all persons appointed to be in authority under its monarch, so [275]far as such laws or commands are consistent with what I suppose to be the law of God; and when they are not, or seem in anywise to need change, I will oppose them loyally and deliberately, not with malicious, concealed, or disorderly violence. VIII. And with the same faithfulness, and under the limits of the same obedience, which I render to the laws of my country, and the commands of its rulers, I will obey the laws of the Society called of St. George, into which I am this day received; and the orders of its masters, and of all persons appointed to be in authority under its masters, so long as I remain a Companion, called of St. George.

I will not enter in the present letter on any notice of the terms of this creed and vow; nor of the grounds which many persons whose help I sincerely desire, may perceive for hesitation in signing it—further definitions of its meaning will be given as occasion comes; nor shall I ever ask any one to sign it whom I do not know to be capable of understanding and holding it in the sense in which it is meant I proceed at once to define more explicitly those laws of the Company of St. George to which it refers, and which must, at least in their power, be known before they can be vowed fealty to.

The object of the Society, it has been stated again and again, is to buy land in England; and thereon to [276]train into the healthiest and most refined life possible, as many Englishmen, Englishwomen, and English children, as the land we possess can maintain in comfort; to establish, for them and their descendants, a national store of continually augmenting wealth; and to organize the government of the persons, and administration of the properties, under laws which shall be just to all, and Secure in their inviolable foundation on the Law of God.

“To buy land,” I repeat, or beg it; but by no means to steal it, or trespass on it, as I perceive the present holders of the most part of it are too ready to do, finding any bits of road or common which they can pilfer unobserved. Are they quite mad, then; and do they think the monster mob, gaining every day in force and knowledge, will let their park walls stand much longer, on those dishonest terms? Doubtful enough their standing is, even on any terms!

But our St. George’s walls will be more securely founded, on this wise. The rents of our lands, though they will be required from the tenantry as strictly as those of any other estates, will differ from common rents primarily in being lowered, instead of raised, in proportion to every improvement made by the tenant; secondly, in that they will be entirely used for the benefit of the tenantry themselves, or better culture of the estates, no money being ever taken by the landlords unless they earn it by their own personal labour.

For the benefit of the tenantry, I say; but by no [277]means, always, for benefit of which they can be immediately conscious. The rents of any particular farmer will seldom be returned to him in work on his own fields, or investment in undertakings which promote his interest. The rents of a rich estate in one shire of England may be spent on a poor one in another, or in the purchase of wild ground, anywhere, on which years of labour must be sunk before it can yield return; or in minerals, or Greek vases, for the parish school. Therefore with the use made of the rents paid, the tenantry will have no practical concern whatever; they will only recognise gradually that the use has been wise, in finding the prices of all serviceable articles diminishing, and all the terms and circumstances of their, lives indicative of increased abundance. They will have no more right, or disposition, to ask their landlord what he is doing with the rents, than they have now to ask him how many race-horses he keeps—or how much he has lost on them. But the difference between landlords who live in Piccadilly, and spend their rents at Epsom and Ascot, and landlords who live on the grounds they are lords of, and spend their rents in bettering it, will not be long in manifesting itself to the simplest minded tenantry; nor, I believe, to the outside and antagonist world.

Sundry questions lately asked me by intelligent correspondents as to the intended relations of the tenantry to the Society, may best be answered by saying simply [278]what I shall do, if ever the collected wealth of the Company enables me to buy an estate for it as large as I could have bought for myself, if I had been a railroad contractor.

Of course I could not touch the terms of the existing leases. The only immediate difference would be, the definitely serviceable application of all the rents, as above stated. But as the leases fell in, I should offer renewal of them to the farmers I liked, on the single condition of their complying with the great vital law of the St. George’s Company,—“no use of steam power, nor of any machines where arms will serve;” allowing such reduction of rent as should fully compensate them for any disadvantage or loss which they could prove they incurred under these conditions. I should give strict orders for the preservation of the existing timber; see that the streams were not wantonly polluted, and interfere in nothing else.

Such farms as were thrown up by their tenants, rather than submit to these conditions, I should be in no haste to re-let; but put land agents on them to cultivate them for the Society in the best manner, and sell their produce;—as soon as any well recommended tenant offered for them, submitting to our laws, he should have them for fixed rent. Thus I should give room for development of whatever personal faculty and energy I could find, and set, if successful, more easily followed example. Meantime my schools and museums, [279]always small and instantly serviceable, would be multiplying among the villages,—youth after youth being instructed in the proper laws of justice, patriotism, and domestic happiness;—those of the Companions who could reside on the lands would, each on his own farm, establish entirely strict obedience to the ultimate laws determined upon as necessary:—if these laws are indeed, as I do not doubt but that sincere care can make them, pleasantly tenable by honest humanity,2 they will be gradually accepted voluntarily by the free tenants; and the system is as certain to extend itself, on all sides, once seen to be right, as the branches of an oak sapling.

While, therefore, I am perfectly content, for a beginning, with our acre of rocky land given us by Mrs. Talbot, and am so little impatient for any increase that I have been quietly drawing ragged-robbin leaves in Malham cove, instead of going to see another twenty acres promised in Worcestershire,—I am yet thinking out my system on a scale which shall be fit for wide European work. Of course the single Master of the Company cannot manage all its concerns as it extends. He must have, for his help, men holding the same relation to him which the Marshals of an army do to its General;—bearing, that is to say, his own authority [280]where he is not present; and I believe no better name than ‘Marshal’ can be found for these. Beneath whom, there will again be the landlords, resident each in his own district; under these, the land agents, tenantry, tradesmen, and hired labourers, some of whom will be Companions, others Retainers, and others free tenants: and outside all this there will be of course an irregular cavalry, so to speak, of more or less helpful friends, who, without sharing in the work, will be glad to further it more or less, as they would any other benevolent institution.

The law that a Companion shall derive no profit from his companionship does not touch the results of his own work. A Companion farmer will have the produce of his farm as much as a free tenant; but he will pay no dividends to the Companions who are not farmers.

The landlords will in general be men of independent fortune, who, having gifts and ingenuity, choose to devote such gifts to the service of the Society; the first condition of their appointment to a lordship will be that they can work as much better than their labourers at all rural labour as a good knight was wont to be a better workman than his soldiers in war. There is no rule of supremacy that can ever supersede this eternal, natural, and divine one. Higher by the head, broader in the shoulders, and heartier in the will, the lord of lands and lives must for ever be, than those he rules; and must [281]work daily at their head, as Richard at the trenches of Acre.

And what am I, myself then, infirm and old, who take, or claim, leadership even of these lords? God forbid that I should claim it; it is thrust and compelled on me—utterly against my will, utterly to my distress, utterly, in many things, to my shame. But I have found no other man in England, none in Europe, ready to receive it,—or even desiring to make himself capable of receiving it. Such as I am, to my own amazement, I stand—so far as I can discern—alone in conviction, in hope, and in resolution, in the wilderness of this modern world. Bred in luxury, which I perceive to have been unjust to others, and destructive to myself; vacillating, foolish, and miserably failing in all my own conduct in life—and blown about hopelessly by storms of passion—I, a man clothed in soft raiment,—I, a reed shaken with the wind, have yet this Message to all men again entrusted to me: “Behold, the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Whatsoever tree therefore bringeth not forth good fruit shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire.”

This message, yet once more; and, more than message, the beginning of the acts that must fulfil it. For, long since, I have said all that needs to be said,—all that it was my proper charge and duty to say. In the one volume of ‘Sesame and Lilies’—nay, in the last forty pages of its central address to Englishwomen—everything [282]is told that I know of vital truth, everything urged that I see to be needful of vital act;—but no creature answers me with any faith or any deed. They read the words, and say they are pretty, and go on in their own ways. And the day has come for me therefore to cease speaking, and begin doing, as best I may; though I know not whether shall prosper, either this or that.

And truly to all wholesome deed here in England, the chances of prosperity are few, and the distinctness of adversity only conquerable by fixed imagination and exhaustless patience—‘Adversis rerum immersabilis undis.’ The wisest men join with the fools, and the best men with the villains, to prevent, if they may, any good thing being done permanently—nay, to provoke and applaud the doing of consistently evil things permanently. To establish a national debt, and in the most legal terms—how easy! To establish a national store, under any legal or moral conditions of perpetuity—how difficult! Every one calls me mad for so much as hoping to do so. ‘This looks like a charity, this educating of peasants,’ said the good lawyer, who drew up the already published conditional form of association. ‘You must not establish a fund for charity; it is sure to lead to all sorts of abuses, and get into wrong hands.’

Well, yes—it in merely human probability may. I do verily perceive and admit, in convinced sorrow, that I live in the midst of a nation of thieves and murderers;3 [283]that everybody around me is trying to rob everybody else; and that, not bravely and strongly, but in the most cowardly and loathsome ways of lying trade; that ‘Englishman’ is now merely another word for black-leg and swindler; and English honour and courtesy changed to the sneaking and the smiles of a whipped pedlar, an inarticulate Autolycus, with a steam hurdy-gurdy instead of a voice. Be this all so; be it so to the heart’s content—or liver and gall’s content—of every modern economist and philosopher. I yet do verily trust that out of this festering mass of scum of the earth, and miserable coagulation of frog-spawn soaked in ditch-water, I can here and there pluck up some drowned honour by the locks, and leave written orders for wholesome deed, and collected monies for the doing thereof, which will be obeyed and guarded after I am gone; and will by no means fall into the power of the mendicant tribe who, too cowardly and heartless to beg from the face of the living, steal the alms of the dead, and unite the apparently inconsistent characters of beggar and thief, seasoning the compound with sacrilege.

Little by little, if my life is spared to me, therefore, (and if I die, there will I doubt not be raised up some one else in my room)—little by little, I or they will get monies and lands together; handful gleaned after handful; field joined to field, and landmarks set which no man shall dare hereafter remove. And over those [284]fields of ours the winds of Heaven shall be pure; and upon them, the work of men shall be done in honour and truth.

In such vague promise, I have for the most part hitherto spoken, not because my own plans were unfixed, but because I knew they would only be mocked at, until by some years of persistence the scheme had run the course of the public talk, and until I had publicly challenged the denial of its principles in their abstract statement, long enough to show them to be invincible. Of these abstract principles, the fifteenth, sixteenth, twentieth, twenty-second and twenty-third letters in ‘Time and Tide,’ express all that is needful; only, in the years that have passed since they were written, the ‘difficulties’ stated in the seventeenth chapter have been under constant review by me; and of the ways in which I mean to deal with them it is now time to speak.

Let us understand then, in the outset, the moral difference between a national debt and a national store.

A national debt, like any other, may be honestly incurred in case of need, and honestly paid in due time. But if a man should be ashamed to borrow, much more should a people; and if a father holds it his honour to provide for his children, and would be ashamed to borrow from them, and leave, with his blessing, his note of hand, for his grandchildren to pay, much more should a nation [285]be ashamed to borrow, in any case, or in any manner; and if it borrow at all, it is at least in honour bound to borrow from living men, and not indebt itself to its own unborn brats. If it can’t provide for them, at least let it not send their cradles to the pawnbroker, and pick the pockets of their first breeches.

A national debt, then, is a foul disgrace, at the best. But it is, as now constituted, also a foul crime. National debts paying interest are simply the purchase, by the rich, of power to tax the poor. Read carefully the analysis given of them above, Letter VIII., p. 7.

The financial operations of the St. George’s Company will be the direct reverse of these hitherto approved arrangements. They will consist in the accumulation of national wealth and store, and therefore in distribution to the poor, instead of taxation of them; and the fathers will provide for, and nobly endow, not steal from, their children and children’s children.

My readers, however, will even yet, I am well aware, however often I have reiterated the statement to them, be unable to grasp the idea of a national store, as an existing possession. They can conceive nothing but a debt;—nay, there are many of them who have a confused notion that a debt is a store!

The store of the St. George’s Company, then, is to be primarily of food; next, of materials for clothing and covert; next, of books and works of art,—food, clothes, books, and works of art being all good, and every poisonous [286]condition of any of them destroyed. The food will not be purveyed by the Borgia, nor the clothing dyed by Deianira, nor the Scriptures written under dictation of the Devil instead of God.

The most simply measurable part of the store of food and clothing will be the basis of the currency, which will be thus constituted.

The standard of value will be a given weight or measure of grain, wine, wool, silk, flax, wood, and marble; all answered for by the government as of fine and pure quality, variable only within narrow limits.

The grain will be either wheat, oats, barley, rice, or maize; the wine of pure vintage, and not less than ten years old;4 the wool, silk, and flax of such standard as can be secured in constancy; the wood, seasoned oak and pine; and for fuel in log and faggot, with finest wood and marble for sculpture. The penny’s worth, florin’s worth, ducat’s worth, and hundred ducats’ worth of each of these articles will be a given weight or measure of them, (the penny roll of our present breakfast table furnishing some notion of what, practically, the grain standard will become.) Into the question of equivalent value I do not enter here; it will be at once determined practically as soon as the system is in work. Of these articles the government will always have in its [287]possession as much as may meet the entire demand of its currency in circulation. That is to say, when it has a million in circulation, the million’s worth of solid property must be in its storehouses: as much more as it can gather, of course; but never less. So that, not only, for his penny, florin, ducat, or hundred-ducat note, a man may always be certain of having his pound, or ton, or pint, or cask, of the thing he chooses to ask for, from the government storehouses, but if the holders of the million of currency came in one day to ask for their money’s worth, it would be found ready for them in one or other form of those substantial articles. Consequently, the sum of the circulating currency being known, the minimum quantity of store will be known. The sum of the entire currency, in and out of circulation, will be given annually on every note issued (no issues of currency being made but on the first day of the year), and in each district, every morning the quantities of the currency in and out of circulation in that district will be placarded at the doors of the government district bank.

The metallic currency will be of absolutely pure gold and silver, and of those metals only; the ducat and half-ducat in gold, the florin, penny, halfpenny, and one-fifth of penny in silver; the smaller coins being beat thin and pierced, the halfpenny with two, the one-fifth of penny with five, apertures.5 I believe this double-centime [288]will be as fine a divisor as I shall need. The florin will be worth tenpence; the ducat, twenty florins.

The weight of the ducat will be a little greater than that of the standard English sovereign, and, being in absolutely pure gold, it will be worth at least five-and-twenty shillings of our present coinage. On one of its sides it will bear the figure of the archangel Michael; on the reverse, a branch of Alpine rose; above the rose-branch, the words ‘Sit splendour’;6 above the Michael, ‘Fiat voluntas’; under the rose-branch, ‘sicut in cœlo’; under the Michael, ‘et in terrâ,’ with the year of the coinage: and round the edge of the coin, ‘Domini.’

The half-ducat will bear the same stamp, except that while on the ducat the St. Michael will be represented standing on the dragon, on the half-ducat he will be simply armed, and bearing St. George’s shield.

On the florin, the St. George’s shield only; the Alpine rose on all three.

On the penny, St. George’s shield on one side, and the English daisy on the other, without inscription. The pierced fractional coins will only bear a chased wreathen fillet, with the required apertures in its interstices. [289]

There will be considerable loss by wear on a coinage of this pure metal; but nothing is so materially conducive to the honour of a state in all financial function as the purity of its coinage; and the loss will never, on the whole currency, equal annually the tenth part of the value of the gunpowder spent at present in salutes or fireworks; and, if a nation can afford to pay for loyal noise and fancies in fire, it may also, and much more rationally, for loyal truth and beauty in its circulating signs of wealth. Nor do I doubt that a currency thus constituted will gradually enter into European commerce, and become everywhere recognised and exemplary.

Supposing any Continental extension of the Company itself took place, its coinage would remain the same for the ducat, but the shield of the State or Province would be substituted for St. George’s on the minor coins.

There will be no ultimate difficulty in obtaining the bullion necessary for this coinage, for the State will have no use for the precious metals, except for its currency or its art. An Englishman, as he is at present educated, takes pride in eating out of a silver plate, and in helping out of a silver tureen the richest swindlers he can ask to dinner. The Companions of St. George may drink out of pewter, and eat off delft, but they will have no knaves for guests, though often beggars; and they will be always perfectly well able to afford to buy five or ten pounds’ worth of gold and silver for their pocket [290]change; and even think it no overwhelming fiscal calamity if as much even as ten shillings should be actually lost in the year, by the wear of it; seeing that the wear of their dinner napkins will be considerably greater in the same time. I suppose that ten pounds’ worth of bullion for the head of each family will amply supply the necessary quantity for circulation; but if it should be found convenient to have fifteen—twenty—or fifty pounds in such form, the national store will assuredly in time accumulate to such desirable level. But it will always be a matter of absolute financial indifference, what part of the currency is in gold and what in paper; its power being simply that of a government receipt for goods received, giving claim to their return on demand. The holder of the receipt may have it, if he likes, written on gold instead of paper, provided he bring the gold for it to be written on; but he may no more have a bar of gold made into money than a roll of foolscap, unless he brings the goods for which the currency is the receipt. And it will therefore, by St. George’s law, be as much forgery to imitate the national coin in gold, as in paper.

Next to this store, which is the basis of its currency, the government will attend to the increase of store of animal food—not mummy food, in tins, but living, on land and sea; keeping under strictest overseership its breeders of cattle, and fishermen, and having always at its command such supply of animal food as may enable [291]it to secure absolute consistency of price in the main markets. In cases when, by any disease or accident, the supply of any given animal food becomes difficult, its price will not be raised, but its sale stopped. There can be no evasion of such prohibition, because every tradesman in food will be merely the salaried servant of the Company, and there will be no temptation to it, because his salary will be the same, whether he sells or not. Of all articles of general consumption, the government will furnish its own priced standard; any man will be allowed to sell what he can produce above that standard, at what price he can get for it; but all goods below the government standard will be marked and priced as of such inferior quality;—and all bad food, cloth, or other article of service, destroyed. And the supervision will be rendered simple by the fewness of the articles permitted to be sold at all; for the dress being in all classes as determined as the heraldry of coronets, and for the most part also rigorously simple, and all luxurious living disgraceful, the entire means of domestic life will be within easy definition.

Of course the idea of regulating dress generally will be looked upon by the existing British public as ridiculous. But it has become ridiculous because masters and mistresses attempt it solely for their own pride. Even with that entirely selfish end, the natural instinct of human creatures for obedience, when in any wholesome relations with their superiors, has enabled [292]the masters to powder their coachmen’s wigs, and polish their footmen’s legs with silk stockings; and the mistresses to limit their lady’s maids, when in attendance, to certain styles of cap.

Now as the dress regulations of the St. George’s Company will be quite as much for the pride of the maid as the mistress, and of the man as the master, I have no fear but they will be found acceptable, and require no strictness of enforcement. The children of peasants, though able to maintain their own families, will be required to be as clean as if they were charity-boys or girls; nobody will be allowed to wear the cast clothes of other people, to sell or pawn their own, or to appear on duty, agricultural or whatever other it may be, in rags, any more than the Horse Guards or the Queen’s dairy-maids are now; also on certain occasions, and within such limits as are needful for good fellowship, they will be urged to as much various splendour as they can contrive. The wealth of the peasant women will be chiefly in hereditary golden ornaments of the finest workmanship; and in jewellery of uncut gems—agates only, or other stones of magnitude, being allowed to be cut, and gems of large size, which are worth the pains, for their beauty; but these will be chiefly used in decorative architecture or furniture, not in dress. The dress of the officers of the Company will be on all occasions plainer than that of its peasants; but hereditary nobles will retain all the insignia of their [293]rank, the one only condition of change required on their entering the St. George’s Company being the use of uncut jewels, and therefore—seldom of diamonds.7

The next main staple of the Company’s store will be its literature.

A chosen series of classical books will be placed in every village library, in number of copies enough to supply all readers; these classics will be perfectly printed and perfectly bound, and all in one size of volume, unless where engravings need larger space: besides these village libraries, there will be a museum in every district, containing all good ancient books obtainable: gradually, as the design expands itself, and as time passes on, absorbing, by gift, or purchase, the contents of private libraries, and connecting themselves with similarly expanding museums of natural history. In all schools, the books necessary for their work will be given to the pupils; and one of their earliest lessons will be the keeping of them clean and orderly.

By ordering of Fors, I went only this last month to see the school in which Wordsworth was educated. It remains, as it was then, a school for peasant lads only; and the doors of its little library, therefore, hang loose on their decayed hinges; and one side of the schoolroom is utterly dark—the window on that side [294]having been long ago walled up, either ‘because of the window tax, or perhaps it had got broken,’ suggested the guardian of the place.

Now it is true that this state of things cannot last long; but the cure will be worse than the disease. A fit of reactionary vanity and folly is sure to seize the village authorities; that old schoolroom, with its sacred associations, will be swept from the hillside, and a grand piece of Birmingham Gothic put up, with a master from Kensington, and enforced weekly competitive examination in Sanscrit, and the Binomial Theorem.

All that the school wants is, hinges to its library doors as good as every shop in the street has to its shutters; the window knocked through again where it was originally; the books whose bindings are worn out, rebound, and a few given (in addition to those on the subjects of arithmetic and grammar), which the boys may rather ask leave to read, than take opportunity to throw into corners.

But the ten or twenty pounds needed for this simple reformation could, I suppose, at present, by no persuasion nor argument be extracted from the united pockets of the gentlemen of the neighbourhood. Meantime, while the library doors flap useless on their hinges, the old country churchyard is grim with parallelograms of iron palisade, enforced partly to get some sacred market for the wares of the rich ironmongers who are buying up the country; and partly to protect their valuable [295]carcases in their purtrefying pride. Of such iron stores the men of St. George’s Company, dead, will need none, and living, permit none. But they will strictly enforce the proper complement of hinges to their school-library doors.

The resuscitation of the, at present extinct, art of writing being insisted upon in the school exercises of the higher classes, the libraries will be gradually enriched with manuscripts of extreme preciousness. A well-written book is as much pleasanter and more beautiful than a printed one as a picture is than an engraving; and there are many forms of the art of illumination which were only in their infancy at the time when the wooden blocks of Germany abolished the art of scripture, and of which the revival will be a necessary result of a proper study of natural history.

In next Fors, I shall occupy myself wholly with the subject of our Art education and property; and in that for December, I hope to publish the legal form of our constitution revised and complete. The terminal clauses respecting the Companions’ right of possession in the lands will be found modified, or in great part omitted, in the recast deed; but I am neither careful nor fearful respecting the terms of this instrument, which is to be regarded merely as a mechanical means of presently getting to work and having land legally secured to us. The ultimate success or failure of the design will not in the least depend on the terms of our constitution, [296]but on the quantity of living honesty and pity which can be found, to be constituted. If there is not material enough out of which to choose Companions, or energy enough in the Companions chosen to fill the chain-mail of all terms and forms with living power, the scheme will be choked by its first practical difficulties; and it matters little what becomes of the very small property its promoters are ever likely to handle. If, on the contrary, as I believe, there be yet honesty and sense enough left in England to nourish the effort, from its narrow source there will soon develop itself a vast Policy, of which neither I nor any one else can foresee the issue, far less verbally or legally limit it; but in which, broadly, by the carrying out of the primally accepted laws of Obedience and Economy, the Master and Marshalls will become the Ministry of the State, answerable for the employment of its revenues, for its relations with external powers, and for such change of its laws as from time to time may be found needful: the Landlords will be the resident administrators of its lands, and immediate directors of all labour,—its captains in war, and magistrates in peace: the tenants will constitute its agricultural and military force, having such domestic and acquisitive independence as may be consistent with patriotic and kindly fellowship: and the artists, schoolmen, tradesmen, and inferior labourers, will form a body of honourably paid retainers, undisturbed in their duty by any chance or care relating to their means of subsistence. [297]