ialists, and the writer has it all his own way),
may be rubbish; but it is out of such rubbish that operatives build
barricades for attack, and legislators prisons for defence.

Our poor friend Lenny drew plenty of this stuff from the tinker's
bag. He thought it very clever and very eloquent; and he supposed the
statistics were as true as mathematical demonstrations.

A famous knowledge-diffuser is looking over my shoulder, and tells me,
"Increase education, and cheapen good books, and all this rubbish will
disappear!" Sir, I don't believe a word of it. If you printed Ricardo
and Adam Smith at a farthing a volume, I still believe that they would
be as little read by the operatives as they are nowadays by a very large
proportion of highly-cultivated men. I still believe that, while the
press works, attacks on the rich and propositions for heave-a-hoys will
always form a popular portion of the Literature of Labour. There's Lenny
Fairfield reading a treatise on hydraulics, and constructing a model for
a fountain into the bargain; but that does not prevent his acquiescence
in any proposition for getting rid of a National Debt, which he
certainly never agreed to pay, and which he is told makes sugar and tea
so shamefully dear. No. I tell you what does a little counteract those
eloquent incentives to break his own head against the strong walls of
the Social System,--it is, that he has two eyes in that head which
are not always employed in reading. And having been told in print that
masters are tyrants, parsons hypocrites or drones in the hive, and
landowners vampires and bloodsuckers, he looks out into the little world
around him, and, first, he is compelled to acknowledge that his master
is not a tyrant (perhaps because he is a foreigner and a philosopher,
and, for what I and Lenny know, a republican). But then Parson Dale,
though High Church to the marrow, is neither hypocrite nor drone. He
has a very good living, it is true,--much better than he ought to have,
according to the "political" opinions of those tracts! but Lenny is
obliged to confess that if Parson Dale were a penny the poorer, he would
do a pennyworth's less good; and comparing one parish with another, such
as Rood Hall and Hazeldean, he is dimly aware that there is no greater
CIVILIZER than a parson tolerably well off. Then, too, Squire Hazeldean,
though as arrant a Tory as ever stood upon shoe-leather, is certainly
not a vampire nor blood sucker. He does not