ith
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; playgrounds, 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 short-sighted
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."_

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*Report on the Training of Pauper Children (1841), p. 18.
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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 worrd! 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
rockledge 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, the basis of all good results
were laid. Once permanent, you do not quarrel with the first
difficulty on your path, and quit it in weak disgust; you
reflect that it cannot be quitted, that it must be conquered, a
wise arrangement fallen on with regard to it. Ye foolish Wedded
Two, who have quarrelled, between whom the Evil Spirit h