lawyers-the money they pay for fares will always go, most of it, into the engineers' and lawyers' pockets. It will be spent in decorating railroad stations with black and blue bricks, and in fighting bills for branch lines. I hear there are more bills for new lines to be brought forward this year than at any previous session. But, Sir, it might do some little good if you were to put it into the engineers' and lawyers' heads that they might for some time to come get as much money for themselves (and a little more safety for the public) by bringing in bills for doubling laterally the present lines as for ramifying them; and if you were also to explain to the shareholders that it would be wiser to spend their capital in preventing accidents attended by costly damages, than in running trains at a loss on opposition branches. It is little business of mine-for I am not a railroad traveller usually more then twice in the year; but I don't like to hear of people's being smashed, even when it is all their fault; so I will ask you merely to reprint this passage from my article on Political Economy in Fraser's Magazine for April, 1863, and so leave the matter to your handling:

"Had the money spent in local mistakes and vain private litigation on the railroads of England been laid out, instead, under proper Government restraint, on really useful railroad work, and had no absurd expense been incurred in ornamenting stations, we might already have had-what ultimately it will be found we must have-quadruple rails, two for passengers and two for traffic, on every great line, and we might have been carried in swift safety, and watched and warded by well-paid pointsmen, for half the present fares.""

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,

J. RUSKIN.

DENMARK HILL, Dec. 7.

1 Essays on Political Economy (Frazer's Magazine, April, 1863, p 449); Munera Pulveris, p. 105, § 128.

[From "The Daily Telegraph," November 30, 1870.]

RAILWAY SAFETY.1

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

SIR: I am very busy, and have not time to write new phrases. Would you mind again reprinting (as you were good enough to do a few days ago ') a sentence from one of the books of mine which everybody said were frantic when I wrote them? You see the date-1863.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,

DENMARK HILL, Nov. 29, 1870.

J. RUSKIN.

I have underlined the words I want to be noticed, but, as you see, made no change in a syllable.

Already the Government, not unapproved, carries letters and parcels for us. Larger packages may in time followeven general merchandise; why not, at last, ourselves? Had the money spent in local mistakes and vain private litigations on the railroads of England been laid out, instead, under proper Government restraint, on really useful railroad work, and had no absurd expense been incurred in ornamenting stations, we might already have had-what ultimately it will be found we MUST have-quadruple rails, two for passengers, and two for traffic, on every great line; and we might have been carried in swift safety, and watched and warded by well-paid pointsmen, for half the present fares.

1 This letter was elicited by a leading article in the Daily Telegraph of November 29, 1870, upon railway accidents, and the means of their prevention, à propos of two recent accidents which had occurred, both on the same day (November 26, 1870) on the London rnd North-Western Railway.

2 In the first letter on the Franco-Prussian War, ante, p. 32. (Daily Telegraph, Oct. 7, 1870.)

II. SERVANTS AND HOUSES.

[From "The Daily Telegraph," September 5, 1865.]

DOMESTIC SERVANTS-MASTERSHIP.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

SIR: You so seldom write nonsense, that you will, I am sure, pardon your friends for telling you when you do. Your article on servants to-day is nonsense. It is just as easy and as difficult now to get good servants as it ever was.' You may have them, as you may have pines and peaches, for the growing, or you may even buy them good, if you can persuade the good growers to spare you them off their walls; but you cannot get them by political economy and the law of supply and demand.

There are broadly two ways of making good servants; the first, a sound, wholesome, thoroughgoing slavery-which was the heathen way, and no bad one neither, provided you understand that to make real "slaves" you must make yourself a real "master" (which is not easy). The second is the Christian's way: "whoso delicately bringeth up his servant from a child, shall have him become his son at the last." " And as few people want their servants to become their sons, this is not a way to their liking. So that, neither having courage or selfdiscipline enough on the one hand to make themselves nobly dominant after the heathen fashion, nor tenderness or justice enough to make themselves nobly protective after the Christian, the present public thinks to manufacture servants bodily out of powder and hay-stuffing-mentally by early instillation of Catechism and other mechanico-religious appliances-and economically, as you helplessly suggest, by the law of supply

1 The article, after commenting on "the good old times," remarked that it is now "a social fact, that the hardest thing in the world to find is a good servant."

“He that delicately bringeth up his servant from a child, shall have him become his son at the length."-Proverbs xxix. 21.

and demand,' with such results as we all see, and most of us more or less feel, and shall feel daily more and more to our cost and selfish sorrow.

Sir, there is only only one way to have good servants; that is, to be worthy of being well served. All nature and all humanity will serve a good master, and rebel against an ignoble one. And there is no surer test of the quality of a nation than the quality of its servants, for they are their masters' shadows, and distort their faults in a flattened mimicry. A wise nation will have philosophers in its servants' hall; a knavish nation will have knaves there; and a kindly nation will have friends there. Only let it be remembered that "kindness" means as with your child, so with your servant, not indulgence, but care.-I am, Sir, seeing that you usually write good sense, and "serve" good causes, your servant to command. J. RUSKIN.'

DENMARK HILL, Sept. 2.

[From "The Daily Telegraph," September 7, 1865.]

DOMESTIC SERVANTS—EXPERIENCE.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

SIR: I thank you much for your kind insertion of my letter, and your courteous and graceful answer to it. Others will thank you also; for your suggestions are indeed much more

"We have really," ran the article, “no remedy to suggest; the evil seems to be curable only by some general distress which will drive more people into seeking service, and so give employers a greater choice. At present the demand appears to exceed the supply, and servants are careless about losing their places through bad behavior.

2 To this letter the Daily Telegraph of September 6 replied by a leader, in which, whilst expressing itself alive to "the sympathy for humanity and appreciation of the dignity which may be made to underlie all human relations," displayed by Mr. Ruskin, it complained that he had only shown "how to cook the cook when we catch her," and not how to catch her. After some detailed remarks on the servants of the day, which seemed "to be more ad rem than Mr. Ruskin's eloquent axioms," it concluded by expressing a hope "that he would come down

ad rem than my mere assertions of principle; but both are necessary. Statements of practical difficulty, and the immediate means of conquering it, are precisely what the editor of a powerful daily journal is able to give; but he cannot give them justly if he ever allow himself to lose sight of the eternal laws which in their imperative bearings manifest themselves more clearly to the retired student of human life in the phases of its history. My own personal experience—if worth anything has been simply that wherever I myself knew how a thing should be done, and was resolved to have it done, I could always get subordinates, if made of average good human material, to do it, and that, on the whole, cheerfully, thoroughly, and even affectionately; and my wonder is usually rather at the quantity of service they are willing to do for me, than at their occasional indolences, or fallings below the standard of seraphic wisdom and conscientiousness. That they shall be of average human material, it is, as you wisely point out, every householder's business to make sure. We cannot choose our relations, but we can our servants; and what sagacity we have and knowledge of human nature cannot be better employed. If your house is to be comfortable, your servants' hearts must be sound, as the timber and stones of its walls; and there must be discretion in the choice, and time allowed for the "settling" of both. The luxury of having pretty servants must be paid for, like all luxuries, in the penalty of their occasional loss; but I fancy the best sort of female servant is generally in aspect and general qualities like Sydney Smith's "Bunch," and a very retainable creature. from the clouds of theory, and give to a perplexed public a few plain, workable instructions how to get hold of good cooks and maids, coachmen and footmen."-Mr. Ruskin replies to it, and to a large amount of further correspondence on the subject, in the next two letters in the Daily Telegraph.

1

1 "A man-servant was too expensive; so I caught up a little gardengirl, made like a milestone, put a napkin in her hand, christened her Bunch, and made her my butler. The girls taught her to read, Mrs. Sydney to wait, and I undertook her morals; Bunch became the best butler in the county."-Sydney Smith's Memoirs (vol. i. p. 207), where several other anecdotes of Bunch are given.