own words, "matter for mind; manufactured products
for the infinitely purer elaborations of human intelligence." This
requires some explanation.

The general upset of 1830 brought to birth, as everybody knows, a number
of old ideas which clever speculators tried to pass off in new bodies.
After 1830 ideas became property. A writer, too wise to publish
his writings, once remarked that "more ideas are stolen than
pocket-handkerchiefs." Perhaps in course of time we may have an Exchange
for thought; in fact, even now ideas, good or bad, have their consols,
are bought up, imported, exported, sold, and quoted like stocks. If
ideas are not on hand ready for sale, speculators try to pass off words
in their stead, and actually live upon them as a bird lives on the seeds
of his millet. Pray do not laugh; a word is worth quite as much as an
idea in a land where the ticket on a sack is of more importance than the
contents. Have we not seen libraries working off the word "picturesque"
when literature would have cut the throat of the word "fantastic"?
Fiscal genius has guessed the proper tax on intellect; it has accurately
estimated the profits of advertising; it has registered a prospectus of
the quantity and exact value of the property, weighing its thought at
the intellectual Stamp Office in the Rue de la Paix.

Having become an article of commerce, intellect and all its products
must naturally obey the laws which bind other manufacturing interests.
Thus it often happens that ideas, conceived in their cups by certain
apparently idle Parisians,--who nevertheless fight many a moral battle
over their champagne and their pheasants,--are handed down at their
birth from the brain to the commercial travellers who are employed to
spread them discreetly, "urbi et orbi," through Paris and the provinces,
seasoned with the fried pork of advertisement and prospectus, by means
of which they catch in their rat-trap the departmental rodent commonly
called subscriber, sometimes stockholder, occasionally corresponding
member or patron, but invariably fool.

"I am a fool!" many a poor country proprietor has said when, caught by
the prospect of being the first to launch a new idea, he finds that he
has, in point of fact, launched his thousand or twelve hundred francs
into a gulf.

"Subscribers are fools who never can be brought to understand that to
go ahead in the intellectual world they must start with more money than
they need for the tour of