ere, what o'clock it had become?--

How have we to regret not only that men have 'no religion,' but that
they have next to no reflection: and go about with heads full of mere
extraneous noises, with eyes wide-open but visionless,--for most part
in the somnambulist state!

CHAPTER VIII.

UNWORKING ARISTOCRACY.

It is well said, 'Land is the right basis of an Aristocracy;' whoever
possesses the Land, he, more emphatically than any other, is the
Governor, Viceking of the people on the Land. It is in these days as
it was in those of Henry Plantagenet and Abbot Samson; as it will in
all days be. The Land is _Mother_ of us all; nourishes, shelters,
gladdens, lovingly enriches us all; in how many ways, from our first
wakening to our last sleep on her blessed mother-bosom, does she, as
with blessed mother-arms, enfold us all!

The Hill I first saw the Sun rise over, when the Sun and I and all
things were yet in their auroral hour, who can divorce me from it?
Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots I have struck into
my Native Soil; no _tree_ that grows is rooted so. From noblest
Patriotism to humblest industrial Mechanism; from highest dying for
your country, to lowest quarrying and coal-boring for it, a Nation's
Life depends upon its Land. Again and again we have to say, there can
be no true Aristocracy but must possess the Land.

Men talk of 'selling' Land. Land, it is true, like Epic Poems and even
higher things, in such a trading world, has to be presented in the
market for what it will bring, and as we say be 'sold:' but the notion
of 'selling,' for certain bits of metal, the _Iliad_ of Homer, how
much more the _Land_ of the World-Creator, is a ridiculous
impossibility! We buy what is saleable of it; nothing more was ever
buyable. Who can or could sell it to us? Properly speaking, the Land
belongs to these two: To the Almighty God; and to all His Children of
Men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on
it. No generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and
effort, sell Land on any other principle: it is not the property of
any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have
worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it.

Again, we hear it said, The soil of England, or of any country, is
properly worth nothing, except 'the labour bestowed on it.' This,
speaking even in the language of Eastcheap, is not correct. The rudest
s