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 22.

Of the normal Position and Duties of the Upper Classes. -General Statement of the Land Question.

April 17, 1867.

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.

Before examining what the occupation and estate of the upper classes ought, classes ought, as far as may reasonably be con jectured, 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 always origi nally composed of the best-bred (in the merely 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:

(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.

(B) Those who are superior by forethought and industry, have for their function to be the providences of the foolish, the weak, and the idle; and to establish such systerms of trade and distribution of goods as shall preserve

the lower orders from perishing by famine, or any other consequence of their carelessness or folly, and to bring them all, according to each man's capacity, at last into some harmonious industry.

(C) The third class, of scholars and artists, of course have for function the teaching and delighting of the inferior multitude.

The office of the upper classes, then, as a body, is to keep order among their inferiors, and raise them always to the nearest level with themselves of which those inferiors are capable. So far as they are thus occupied, they are invariably loved and reverenced intensely by all beneath them, and reach, themselves, the highest types of human power and beauty.

This, then, being the natural ordinance and function of aristocracy, its corruption, like that of all other beautiful things under the Devil's touch, is a very fearful one. Its corruption is, that those who ought to be the rulers and guides of the people, forsake their task of painful honourableness; seek their own pleasure and pre-eminence only; and use their power, subtlety, conceded influence, prestige of ancestry, and mechanical instrumentality of martial power, to make the lower orders toil for them, and feed and clothe them for nothing, and be come in various ways their living property, goods, and

chattels, even to the point of utter regardlessness of whatever misery these serfs may suffer through such insolent domination, or they themselves, their masters, commit of crime to enforce it.

And this is especially likely to be the case when means of various and tempting pleasure are put within the reach of the upper classes by advanced conditions of national commerce and knowledge: and it is certain to be the case as soon as position among those upper classes becomes any way purchaseable with money, instead of being the assured measure of some kind of worth (either strength of hand, or true wisdom of conduct, or imaginative gift). It has been becoming more and more the condition of the aristocracy of Europe, ever since the fifteenth century; and is gradually bringing about its ruin, and in that ruin, checked only by the power which here and there a good soldier or true statesman achieves over the putrid chaos of its vain policy, the ruin of all beneath it; which can be arrested only, either by the repentance of that old aristocracy (hardly to be hoped), or by the stern substitution of other aristocracy worthier than it. Corrupt as it may be, it and its laws together, I would at this moment, if I could, fasten every one of its institutions down with bands of iron and trust for all progress and help against its tyranny simply to the