evitable truth--that whether you lend your money to provide an
invalided population with crutches, stretchers, hearses, or the railroad
accommodation which is so often synonymous with the three, the _tax on
the use_ of these, which constitutes the shareholder's dividend, is a
permanent burden upon them, exacted by avarice, and by no means an aid
granted by benevolence.

165. (L) "Sanctioned by experience." The experience of twenty-three
years, my Lord, and with the following result:--

"We have now had an opportunity of practically testing the theory. Not
more than seventeen" (now twenty-three--I quote from a letter dated
1875) "years have passed since" (by the final abolition of the Usury
laws) "all restraint was removed from the growth of what Lord Coke calls
'this pestilent weed,'" and we see Bacon's words verified--"the rich
becoming richer, and the poor poorer, throughout the civilized world."
Letter from Mr. R. Sillar, quoted in _Fors Clavigera_, No. 43.

(M) "Inevitable." Neither "impossible" nor "inevitable" were words of
old Christian Faith. But see the closing paragraph of my letter.

(N) Before you call on me to substantiate this charge, my Lord, I
should like to insert after the words, "steadily preaching," the phrase,
"and politely explaining"--with the Pauline qualification, "whether by
word, or our epistle."

166. (O) "The great cities of to-day are not worse than great cities
always have been," I do not remember having said that they were, my
Lord; I have never anticipated for Manchester a worse fate than that of
Sardis or Sodom; nor have I yet observed any so mighty works shown forth
in her by her ministers, as to make her impenitence less pardonable than
that of Sidon or Tyre. But I used the particular expression which your
Lordship supposes me to have overcharged in righteous indignation, "a
boil breaking forth with blains on man and beast," because that
particular plague was the one which Moses was ordered, in the Eternal
Wisdom, to connect with the ashes of the Furnace--literally, no less
than spiritually, when he brought the Israelites forth out of Egypt,
_from the midst of the Furnace of Iron_. How literally, no less than in
faith and hope, the smoke of "the great city, which spiritually is
called Sodom and Egypt," has poisoned the earth, the waters, and the
living creatures, flocks and herds, and the babes that know not their
right hand from their left--neither Memphis, Gomorrah, nor Cahors a