l remembrance; and, with little
disguise, a new opposite Commandment, _Thou shalt steal_, is
everywhere promulgated,--it perhaps behooved, in this universal dotage
and deliration, the sound portion of mankind to bestir themselves and
rally. When the widest and wildest violations of that divine right of
Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable, are
sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has lived
to hear it asserted that _we have no Property in our very Bodies, but
only an accidental Possession and Life-rent_, what is the issue to be
looked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their noose-gins and baited
fall-traps, keep-down the smaller sort of vermin; but what, except
perhaps some such Universal Association, can protect us against whole
meat-devouring and man-devouring hosts of Boa-constrictors? If,
therefore, the more sequestered Thinker have wondered, in his privacy,
from what hand that perhaps not ill-written _Program_ in the Public
Journals, with its high _Prize-Questions_ and so liberal _Prizes_,
could have proceeded,--let him now cease such wonder; and, with
undivided faculty, betake himself to the _Concurrenz_ (Competition).'

We ask: Has this same 'perhaps not ill-written _Program_,' or any
other authentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society,
fallen under the eye of the British Reader, in any Journal foreign or
domestic? If so, what are those _Prize-Questions_; what are the terms
of Competition, and when and where? No printed Newspaper-leaf, no
farther light of any sort, to be met with in these Paper-bags! Or is
the whole business one other of those whimsicalities and perverse
inexplicabilities, whereby Herr Teufelsdroeckh, meaning much or
nothing, is pleased so often to play fast-and-loose with us?

* * * * *

Here, indeed, at length, must the Editor give utterance to a painful
suspicion, which, through late Chapters, has begun to haunt him;
paralysing any little enthusiasm that might still have rendered his
thorny Biographical task a labour of love. It is a suspicion grounded
perhaps on trifles, yet confirmed almost into certainty by the more
and more discernible humoristico-satirical tendency of Teufelsdroeckh,
in whom underground humours and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheel
within wheel, defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in one word, that these
Autobiographical Documents are partly a mystification! What if many a
so-called