has to work for his living, to the man who thinks it would be so
much more pleasant to live at his ease in a phalanstere than to work
eight or ten hours a day; to the man of talent and action and industry,
whose future is invested in that tranquillity and order of a State
in which talent and action and industry are a certain capital,--why,
Messrs. Coutts, the great bankers, had better encourage a theory to
upset the system of banking! Whatever disturbs society, yea, even by a
causeless panic, much more by an actual struggle, falls first upon the
market of labour, and thence affects prejudicially every department
of intelligence. In such times the arts are arrested; literature is
neglected; people are too busy to read anything save appeals to their
passions. And capital, shaken in its sense of security, no longer
ventures boldly through the land, calling forth all the energies of toil
and enterprise, and extending to every workman his reward. Now, Lenny,
take this piece of advice. You are young, clever, and aspiring: men
rarely succeed in changing the world; but a man seldom fails of success
if he lets the world alone, and resolves to make the best of it. You
are in the midst of the great crisis of your life; it is the struggle
between the new desires knowledge excites, and that sense of poverty
which those desires convert either into hope and emulation, or into envy
and despair. I grant that it is an up-hill work that lies before you;
but don't you think it is always easier to climb a mountain than it is
to level it? These books call on you to level the mountain; and that
mountain is the property of other people, subdivided amongst a great
many proprietors, and protected by law. At the first stroke of the
pickaxe, it is ten to one but what you are taken up for a trespass. But
the path up the mountain is a right of way uncontested. You may be safe
at the summit, before (even if the owners are fools enough to let you)
you could have levelled a yard. Cospetto!" quoth the doctor, "it is more
than two thousand years ago since poor Plato began to level it, and the
mountain is as high as ever!"

Thus saying, Riccabocca came to the end of his pipe, and stalking
thoughtfully away, he left Leonard Fairfield trying to extract light
from the smoke.

CHAPTER IX.

Shortly after this discourse of Riccabocca's, an incident occurred to
Leonard that served to carry his mind into new directions. One evening,
when his mother was