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In a Printed Sheet of the assiduous, much-abused, and truly useful Mr.
Chadwick's, containing queries and responses from far and near as to
this great question, 'What is the effect of education on working-men,
in respect of their value as mere workers?' the present Editor,
reading with satisfaction a decisive unanimous verdict as to
Education, reads with inexpressible interest this special remark, put
in by way of marginal incidental note, from a practical manufacturing
Quaker, whom, as he is anonymous, we will call Friend Prudence.
Prudence keeps a thousand workmen; has striven in all ways to attach
them to him; has provided conversational soirees; play-grounds, bands
of music for the young ones; went even 'the length of buying them a
drum:' all which has turned out to be an excellent investment. For a
certain person, marked here by a black stroke, whom we shall name
Blank, living over the way,--he also keeps somewhere about a thousand
men; but has done none of these things for them, nor any other thing,
except due payment of the wages by supply-and-demand. Blank's workers
are perpetually getting into mutiny, into broils and coils: every six
months, we suppose, Blank has a strike; every one month, every day and
every hour, they are fretting and obstructing the shortsighted Blank;
pilfering from him, wasting and idling for him, omitting and
committing for him. "I would not," says Friend Prudence, "exchange my
workers for his _with seven thousand pounds to boot_."[29]

Right, O honourable Prudence; thou art wholly in the right: Seven
thousand pounds even as a matter of profit for this world, nay for the
mere cash-market of this world! And as a matter of profit not for this
world only, but for the other world and all worlds, it outweighs the
Bank of England!--Can the sagacious reader descry here, as it were the
outmost inconsiderable rock-ledge of a universal rock-foundation, deep
once more as the Centre of the World, emerging so, in the experience
of this good Quaker, through the Stygian mud-vortexes and general
Mother of Dead Dogs, whereon, for the present, all swags and
insecurely hovers, as if ready to be swallowed?

* * * * *

Some Permanence of Contract is already almost possible; the principle
of Permanence, year by year, better seen into and elaborated, may
enlarge itself, expand gradually on every side into a system. This
once secured, th