10. Plato's "necessary sciences." 11, 12. Science evilly laid hold of worse than none. A great sentence from Plato, and its translators. 13. Plato on the teaching of science. 14. Asceticism and self-discipline to be practised only to make us capable of sacred joy. 15. Importance of birth in education. Plato on tragedy: Greek ideal of drama. Actors, doers. Realities of life, the best and truest tragedy. 16. Plato's scheme of education. Grammar (the general word for literature) only to be taught to youths for three years. 17. First training of children. Virtue, the symphony of the soul's faculties and parts. The essence of education is Music, properly understood. 18. Definitions and relations of Soul and Body in Plato's writings. Music essential to the right government of passions and intellect. Choral association essential to it. 19. Importance of children's play. Deadliness of novelty in youthful education. Rank of Angels among ancient spiritual powers. Plato's Three Choirs. Sacred continuance of song in the discipline of adult life. 20. Uselessness of Plato's conception to the modern mind. His ideal and its perversion. How the evil angels pervert the powers of the greatest men; yet their ministry to the soul of the race continues. 21. Sermon by the Bishop of Manchester on the peril of anticipating immortality. J. S. Mill on belief in immortality as a useful illusion. 22. Challenge to the Bishop on Usury repeated. 23. The gist of the author's quotations from Plato. Spiritual uses of dress, food, and music; reformation of the lower orders only possible by distribution of these things among them. The test of Christianity. 24. The need of giving to the poor without any return therefor. Modern prayer only street-boys' play with God's door-knocker. 25. Exhortation to learn the meaning of Prayer and Alms. Dies Misericordiæ to be remembered with the Dies Iræ. The Light of the Day of the Lord: to whom promised.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.-26. Affairs of the Company prospering. 27. Affairs of the Master too many for him. 28. Letter from a correspondent on the conduct of life. 29. The author's reply: no compromise with evil possible. The true meaning of martyrdom and idolatry. 30. Advice on bodily exercise. 31. Report of the Howard Association on "Industrial Education versus Crime.' 32. Letter from an English doctor, settled as a farmer in California. 33. Letter from Thomas Dixon on the new Labour League of America and on English leisure. 34. An answer from Plato. 35. Article from the Scotsman on rural depopulation.

HESIOD'S MEASURE.

LETTER 83 (November)

1. Greek leisure obtained by slavery. The true story and strength of the world in its workers; its fiction and feebleness in its idlers. The coming revolution. Good servants to wait for their Master's coming. 2. Plato's choir of old men. 3. The seven technical divisions of music by him. 4. His account of

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the ruin of the Doric cities. His definition of music, as the movement of sound so as to reach the soul for the education of it in virtue. 5. The Greek "Amusia" and modern "Amusement." The measure of Hesiod: the half more than the whole. 6. Ruin of England by the "amusia of her Cavaliers and Puritans. Unconscious action of Scott's imagination as pleaded by Scott himself in the Fortunes of Nigel. 7. The heavenly involuntariness of the great masters. 8. Its connexion with sense of moral law. 9. "Poetical Justice." Shakespeare and Tragic Destiny. 10. Assertion of moral law in the Heart of Midlothian, the greatest of Scott's novels. Its analysis of Protestantism. 11. Its tragedy the result of "museless" hardness of nature. 12. Muselessness of the Cameronian leaders. Puritan errors respecting dancing; their negligence of the laws of nature; consequent corruption of dance and song. 13. The sirenic blasphemy of modern oratorio and opera. Plato's "euphemy" and "blasphemy." 14. Letter from A. S. Murray on Greek myths of music. 15. The author's interpretation of them.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.-16. Affairs of the Company. Difficulties on the Abbey Dale property. 17. Affairs of the Master. His woodchopping. 18. Article from the Builder on land monopoly. 19, 20. Extracts and Correspondence on Temporalities and Church Leases (1838). 21. Archbishop Tait and Irish Disestablishment: newspaper extract. 22. Letter on the conditions of labour in the case of a shop-girl under a churchwarden. 23. False and true education exemplified in the bondage of a government teacher, and the happiness of an old shepherd and his wife. 24. Manchester and the Thirlmere water scheme. Hydrophobia. 25. The real causes of the Indian famine. 26. The instincts of maternity extinguished by Mammon. Some statistics of home produce in 1857. 27. Talbot Village, Bournemouth. 28. Mourning by machinery: a tolling machine.

(Brantwood, October 29.) 1. "They have no wine:" an appeal for the help of the poor. "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it: a command to serve the Lord. 2. An autumn evening above the Lago di Garda. 3, 4. The peasant race of Northern Italy. The Church on earth is now in such peasant races. 5. "To give them their meat in due season." 6. The return of the Lord "from the wedding." 7. "My Lord delayeth his coming." 8-11. The punishment of hypocrisy and division of heart: passages from Livy and Dante. 12. "Choose ye this day whom you will serve.” 13. Future plans for Fors Clavigera: henceforth to be constructive only, the author putting aside expostulation and blame. 14. Summary of the evil of the day. Pillage of the labourer by the idler -the landlord, soldier, lawyer, priest, merchant, and usurer. To be cured only by an ordered Hierarchy. 15. The words of the King to the Seven Churches; 16, addressed to their Angels, or Guardian Spirits. 17-26. Analysis of Revelation, chapters ii. and iii.

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FORS CLAVIGERA

LETTER 78

COMMISSARIAT1

VENICE, 20th November, 1876.

1. THE day on which this letter will be published will, I trust, be the first of the seventh year of the time during which I have been permitted, month by month, to continue the series of Fors Clavigera. In which seventh year I hope to gather into quite clear form the contents of all the former work; closing the seventh volume with accurate index of the whole. These seven volumes, if I thus complete them, will then be incorporated as a single work in the consecutive series of my books.

2

3

If I am spared to continue the letters beyond the seventh year, their second series will take a directly practical character, giving account of, and directing, the actual operations of St. George's Company; and containing elements of instruction for its schools, the scheme of which shall be, I will answer for it, plainly enough, by the end of this year, understood. For, in the present volume, I intend speaking directly, in every letter, to the Yorkshire

[See below, § 9.]

On this subject, see below, p. 166.]

5

[Letters 85-96 (No. 85 being the first of the eighth year) were called "New Series" see the Bibliographical Note (above, p. xxx.).]

4

["But I did not say If the Lord will,' and the answer was an entirely unexpected one."-MS. note by Author in his copy. He refers to the illnesses which made the last volume of Fors intermittent, and prevented him from carrying out the intentions stated in the text, which, moreover, were somewhat modified in a later Letter (see below, p. 138).]

' [Of the original edition, Letters 73-84.]

operatives, and answering every question they choose to put to me,-being very sure that they will omit few relevant

ones.

2. And first they must understand one more meaning I have in the title of the book. By calling it the "Nail bearer," I mean not only that it fastens in sure place the truths it has to teach (January, 18721), but also, that it nails down as on the barn-door of our future homestead, for permanent and picturesque exposition, the extreme follies of which it has to give warning: so that in expanded heraldry of beak and claw, the spread, or split, harpies and owls of modern philosophy may be for evermore studied, by the curious, in the parched skins of them.

For instance, at once, and also for beginning of some such at present needful study, look back to Letter 44, §§ 2, 3, wherein you will find a paragraph thus nailed fast out of the Pall Mall Gazette-a paragraph which I must now spend a little more space of barn-door in delicately expanding. It is to the following effect (I repeat, for the sake of readers who cannot refer to the earlier volumes):—

"The wealth of this world may be 'practically' regarded as infinitely great. It is not true that what one man appropriates becomes thereby useless to others; and it is also untrue that force or fraud, direct or indirect, are the principal, or indeed that they are at all common or important, modes of acquiring wealth."

You will find this paragraph partly answered, though but with a sneer, in the following section, § 4; but I now take it up more seriously, for it is needful you should see the full depth of its lying.

3. The "wealth of this world" consists, broadly, in its healthy food-giving land, its convenient building land, its useful animals, its useful minerals, its books, and works of art.3

The healthy food-giving land, so far from being infinite, is, in fine quality, limited to narrow belts of the globe.

[Letter 13, § 4 (Vol. XXVII. p. 231; and compare Letter 60, § 2 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 463).]

[Vol. XXVIII. pp. 126-128.]

3 [Compare A Joy for Ever, §§ 144 seq. (Vol. XVI. pp. 129 seq.).]

What properly belongs to you as Yorkshiremen is only Yorkshire. You, by appropriating Yorkshire, keep other people from living in Yorkshire. The Yorkshire squires say the whole of Yorkshire belongs to them, and will not let any part of Yorkshire become useful to anybody else, but by enforcing payment of rent for the use of it; nor will the farmers who rent it allow its produce to become useful to anybody else but by demanding the highest price they can get for the same.

The convenient building land of the world is so far from being infinite, that, in London, you find a woman of eightand-twenty paying one-and-ninepence a week for a room in which she dies of suffocation with her child in her arms (Fors, December, 18721); and, in Edinburgh, you find people paying two pounds twelve shillings a year for a space nine feet long, five broad, and six high, ventilated only by the chimney (Fors, April, 1874; and compare March, 1873 2).

4. The useful animals of the world are not infinite: the finest horses are very rare; and the squires who ride them, by appropriating them, prevent you and me from riding them. If If you and I and the rest of the mob took them from the squires, we could not at present probably ride them; and unless we cut them up and ate them, we could not divide them among us, because they are not infinite.

The useful minerals of Yorkshire are iron, coal, and marble,-in large quantities, but not infinite quantities by any means; and the masters and managers of the coal mines, spending their coal on making useless things out of the iron, prevent the poor all over England from having fires, so that they can now only afford close stoves (if those!) (Fors, March, 1873 3).

The books and works of art in Yorkshire are not infinite, nor even in England. Mr. Fawkes' Turners are many, but not infinite at all, and as long as they are at Farnley

[Letter 24, § 19 (Vol. XXVII. p. 431).]

[Letter 40, § 11 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 73), and Letter 27, § 11 (Vol. XXVII. p. 498).] 3 [Letter 27, § 14 (Vol. XXVII. p. 502).]