per) " 17.

EGYPT (so called from her dark eyes) " 17.

JESSIE (who somehow always makes the room look
brighter when she is in it) " 18.

MARY (of whom everybody, including the Old Lecturer,
is in great awe) " 20.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

I have seldom been more disappointed by the result of my best pains
given to any of my books, than by the earnest request of my publisher,
after the opinion of the public had been taken on the 'Ethics of the
Dust,' that I would "write no more in dialogue!" However, I bowed to
public judgment in this matter at once, (knowing also my inventive
powers to be of the feeblest,); but in reprinting the book, (at the
prevailing request of my kind friend, Mr. Henry Willett,) I would pray
the readers whom it may at first offend by its disconnected method, to
examine, nevertheless, with care, the passages in which the principal
speaker sums the conclusions of any dialogue: for these summaries were
written as introductions, for young people, to all that I have said on
the same matters in my larger books; and, on re-reading them, they
satisfy me better, and seem to me calculated to be more generally
useful, than anything else I have done of the kind.

The summary of the contents of the whole book, beginning, "You may at
least earnestly believe," at p. 130, is thus the clearest exposition I
have ever yet given of the general conditions under which the Personal
Creative Power manifests itself in the forms of matter; and the analysis
of heathen conceptions of Deity, beginning at p. 131, and closing at p.
138, not only prefaces, but very nearly supersedes, all that in more
lengthy terms I have since asserted, or pleaded for, in 'Aratra
Pentelici,' and the 'Queen of the Air.'

And thus, however the book may fail in its intention of suggesting new
occupations or interests to its younger readers, I think it worth
reprinting, in the way I have also reprinted 'Unto this Last,'--page for
page; that the students of my more advanced works may be able to refer
to these as the original documents of them; of which the most essential
in this book are these following.

I. The explanation of the baseness of the avaricious functions of the
Lower Pthah, p. 39, with his beetle-gospel, p. 41, "that a nation can
stand on its vices better than on its virtues," explains the main motive
of all my books on Political Economy