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Your England, in her unexampled prosperity, according to the Morning Post,' can no longer afford her roast beef- or her fireside. She can only afford boiled bones, and a stove-side.

"Well. Boiled bones are not so bad things, neither. I know something more about them than the writer of the penny cookery book. Fifty years ago, Count Rumford perfectly ascertained the price, and nourishing power, of good soup; and I shall give you a recipe for Theseus' vegetable diet, and for Lycurgus' black and Esau's red pottage, for your better pot-luck. But what next?

"To-day, you cannot afford beef- to-morrow, are you sure that you will be still able to afford bones? If things are to go on thus, and you are to study economy to the utmost, I can beat the author of the penny cookery book even on that ground. What say you to this diet of the Otomac Indians; persons quite of our present English character?

"They have a decided aversion to cultivate the land, and live almost exclusively on hunting and fishing. They are men of a very robust constitution, and passionately fond of fermented liquors. While the waters of the Orinoco are low, they subsist on fish and turtles, but at the period of its inundations (when the fishing ceases) they eat daily, during some months, three quarters of a pound of clay, slightly hardened by fire'(probably stewable in your modern stoves with better effect). 'Half, at least' (this is Father

Gumilla's statement, quoted by Humboldt), 'of the bread of the Otomacs and the Guamoes is

clay and those who feel a weight on their stomach purge themselves with the fat of the crocodile, which restores their appetite, and enables them to continue to eat pure earth!' 'I doubt,' Humboldt himself goes on, the manteca de caiman being a purgative. But it is certain that the Guamoes are very fond, if not of the fat, at least of the flesh, of the crocodile!'

"We have surely brickfields enough to keep our clay from ever rising to famine prices, in any fresh accession of prosperity; and though fish can't live in our rivers, the muddy waters are just of the consistence crocodiles like; and, at Manchester and Rochdale, I have observed the surfaces of the streams smoking, so that we need be under no concern as to temperature. I should think you might produce quite 'streaky' crocodile, - fat and flesh concordant, - St. George becoming a bacon purveyor, as well as seller,' and laying down his dragon in salt (indeed, it appears, by an experiment made in Egypt itself, that the oldest of human words is Bacon); potted crocodile will doubtless, also, from countries unrestrained by

1 Allusion to the blunder of Emerson, who confused the St. George of Cappadocia and Venice and England with the Arian bacon-selling bishop of Cilicia. The oldest word was what the Egyptian babies said, whom Psammetichus isolated from their birth for his famous experiment in comparative philology (Herodotus ii. 2), Béko-s; pronounced, with more distinctively neuter termination, Baco-n.

religious prejudices, be imported, as the English demand increases, at lower quotations; and for what you are going to receive, the Lord make you truly thankful."

I do not call those classical allusions pedantic; for they are the spontaneous suggestions of an imaginative and scholarly mind. I do not call the quotations from Humboldt coarse; for they are the plain speech of an outraged sense of decency,

outraged in a way which less delicate natures cannot comprehend, in the proposals, not very fully set forth in the passage quoted, but often noticed in "Fors," to do away with the last remnants of the comforts of home, and the graces of life, in order to accommodate the impoverished laborer to his still more impoverished lot. Nor do I call the conclusion profane; for it is a counter-blast of indignation against the wellmeant but mistaken preaching which recommended, as a religious duty, acquiescence in remediable injustice, and the hypocrisy of gratitude for stones instead of daily bread.

But this mingling of jest and earnest was misunderstood. After a while the author learned too painfully the danger of trifling with cherished beliefs. He forswore levity, but soon relapsed into the old style, out of sheer sincerity; for he was too much in earnest not to be himself all over in his utterances, without writing up to, or down to, any other person's standard. With all the declamation, and all the wit, there was substance enough

of solid and reasonable purpose to knit the work together. It was not, as one of his old friends. said, his mind's wastepaper basket; but the unfolding of wrappings, perhaps unnecessary, round a definite proposal. He began by declining all connection with ordinary political life in any form; he said that the existing order of things was wholly wrong, and just for that reason the existing methods of government could not set them right, by acts of a parliament which he simply declined to recognize as efficient to cope with the question. Instead of that, rescue was to come from individuals, as it has always done before in times of barbarism and anarchy. If men would, each in his place, carry out the rudiments of justice and social morality, — doing good work well, helping others, harming none, and showing themselves law-worthy, -if such-minded men and women would withdraw from the struggle for success in the world and set the example of better things in a wholesome country life; that, he felt, would really effect a change. It was like the old scheme of St. Benedict, the formation of agricultural communities, by which Europe was, even more than by the feudal and chivalric institutions imitated in "Time and Tide," founded and civilized out of swampy forests and lawless barbarism.

Mr. Ruskin did not wish to lead a colony or to head a revolution. He had been pondering for fifteen years the cause of poverty and crime, and the conviction had grown upon him that modern

commercialism was at the root of it all. Other men in other lands were being gradually led to the same conclusion by different ways; and French communism, German socialism, Russian anarchism were the expressions of a kindred movement, but very differently developed. On the Continent the wrong was open and obvious, in the form of tyrannical government in church and state; the remedy suggested by precedent was violent rebellion. Here, in England, with apparent liberty of conduct and opinion, the same evils took a more subtle shape; and were practiced by the kindliest men and women with the best intentions. The slow and sure pace of our constitutional reforms accustomed us to a grumbling content, and a disinclination for extreme

measures.

Mr. Ruskin's attacks on commercialism - his analysis of its bad influence on all sections of society — were too vigorous and uncompromising for the newspaper editors who received "Fors," and even for most of his private friends. We don't like agitators.

There were, however, some who saw what he was aiming at; and let it be remarked that his first encouragement came from the highest quarters. Just as Sydney Smith, the chief critic of earlier days, had been the first to praise " Modern Painters," in the teeth of adverse opinion, so now Carlyle spoke for "Fors."