enelm Chillingly then touched with
serene analysis on the eulogies lavished on his father as man and
landlord.

"As man," he said, "my father no doubt deserves all that can be said
by man in favour of man. But what, at the best, is man? A crude,
struggling, undeveloped embryo, of whom it is the highest attribute that
he feels a vague consciousness that he is only an embryo, and cannot
complete himself till he ceases to be a man; that is, until he becomes
another being in another form of existence. We can praise a dog as
a dog, because a dog is a completed _ens_, and not an embryo. But to
praise a man as man, forgetting that he is only a germ out of which a
form wholly different is ultimately to spring, is equally opposed
to Scriptural belief in his present crudity and imperfection, and to
psychological or metaphysical examination of a mental construction
evidently designed for purposes that he can never fulfil as man. That my
father is an embryo not more incomplete than any present is quite true;
but that, you will see on reflection, is saying very little on his
behalf. Even in the boasted physical formation of us men, you are
aware that the best-shaped amongst us, according to the last scientific
discoveries, is only a development of some hideous hairy animal, such
as a gorilla; and the ancestral gorilla itself had its own aboriginal
forefather in a small marine animal shaped like a two-necked bottle. The
probability is that, some day or other, we shall be exterminated by a
new development of species.

"As for the merits assigned to my father as landlord, I must
respectfully dissent from the panegyrics so rashly bestowed on him. For
all sound reasoners must concur in this, that the first duty of an owner
of land is not to the occupiers to whom he leases it, but to the nation
at large. It is his duty to see that the land yields to the community
the utmost it can yield. In order to effect this object, a landlord
should put up his farms to competition, exacting the highest rent he can
possibly get from responsible competitors. Competitive examination is
the enlightened order of the day, even in professions in which the best
men would have qualities that defy examination. In agriculture, happily,
the principle of competitive examination is not so hostile to the choice
of the best man as it must be, for instance, in diplomacy, where a
Talleyrand would be excluded for knowing no language but his own; and
still more in the