cord to have a knot at the end of it. It would do no harm to
draw the proletariat's attention to the classes above him who work with
their heads; for he has unbounded fear of any kind of head work. A
fellow who rides through the narrow streets of a populous town with
unemployed post-horses or cart-horses, unceasingly cracking with all his
strength a whip several yards long, instantly deserves to dismount and
receive five really good blows with a stick. If all the philanthropists
in the world, together with all the legislators, met in order to bring
forward their reasons for the total abolition of corporal punishment, I
would not be persuaded to the contrary.

But we can see often enough something that is even still worse. I mean a
carter walking alone, and without any horses, through the streets
incessantly cracking his whip. He has become so accustomed to the crack
in consequence of its unwarrantable toleration. Since one looks after
one's body and all its needs in a most tender fashion, is the thinking
mind to be the only thing that never experiences the slightest
consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect? Carters,
sack-bearers (porters), messengers, and such-like, are the beasts of
burden of humanity; they should be treated absolutely with justice,
fairness, forbearance and care, but they ought not to be allowed to
thwart the higher exertions of the human race by wantonly making a
noise. I should like to know how many great and splendid thoughts these
whips have cracked out of the world. If I had any authority, I should
soon produce in the heads of these carters an inseparable _nexus
idearum_ between cracking a whip and receiving a whipping.

Let us hope that those nations with more intelligence and refined
feelings will make a beginning, and then by force of example induce the
Germans to do the same.[8] Meanwhile, hear what Thomas Hood says of them
(_Up the Rhine)_: "_For a musical people they are the most noisy I ever
met with_" That they are so is not due to their being more prone to
making a noise than other people, but to their insensibility, which
springs from obtuseness; they are not disturbed by it in reading or
thinking, because they do not think; they only smoke, which is their
substitute for thought. The general toleration of unnecessary noise, for
instance, of the clashing of doors, which is so extremely ill-mannered
and vulgar, is a direct proof of the dulness and poverty of thought that
on