sions to any good purpose ourselves, the instinct of
communicating that use to others rises side by side with our power. If
you can read a book rightly, you will want others to hear it; if you can
enjoy a picture rightly, you will want others to see it: learn how to
manage a horse, a plough, or a ship, and you will desire to make your
subordinates good horsemen, ploughmen, or sailors; you will never be
able to see the fine instrument you are master of, abused; but, once fix
your desire on anything useless, and all the purest pride and folly in
your heart will mix with the desire, and make you at last wholly
inhuman, a mere ugly lump of stomach and suckers, like a cuttle-fish.

SIBYL. But surely, these two beautiful things, gold and diamonds, must
have been appointed to some good purpose?

L. Quite conceivably so, my dear: as also earthquakes and pestilences;
but of such ultimate purposes we can have no sight. The practical,
immediate office of the earthquake and pestilence is to slay us, like
moths; and, as moths, we shall be wise to live out of their way. So, the
practical, immediate office of gold and diamonds is the multiplied
destruction of souls (in whatever sense you have been taught to
understand that phrase); and the paralysis of wholesome human effort and
thought on the face of God's earth: and a wise nation will live out of
the way of them. The money which the English habitually spend in cutting
diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks
instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbour round the whole
island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a
true piece of regalia. (_Leaves this to their thoughts for a little
while._) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the
chance of seeing a fine crystal of diamond unhacked by the jeweller.

SIBYL. Would it be more beautiful uncut?

L. No; but of infinite interest. We might even come to know something
about the making of diamonds.

SIBYL. I thought the chemists could make them already?

L. In very small black crystals, yes; but no one knows how they are
formed where they are found; or if indeed they are formed there at all.
These, in my hand, look as if they had been swept down with the gravel
and gold; only we can trace the gravel and gold to their native rocks,
but not the diamonds. Read the account given of the diamond in any good
work on mineralogy;--you will find nothing but lists of local