concomitant still with the principles of its founders, and like them reduced to natural level, shall lie a crumbling disjointed monument, the victim of fruitless opposition to Nature's laws, and of fallacious policy: the owl shall whoop round its fragments, the goat browse the thistles rooted in its crevices."

LETTER VII.

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In the evening we resumed our conversation. "I trust," said L, "you have this day both seen and heard enough to convince you, that in what is termed a state of high polish and civilization, man is not a being feeling the same wants and desires only that he does when fresh from the hand of Nature; when he is guided by mere animal instinct that he is removed to an immense distance from those of his genus, who make both bodily and mental powers only the means of satisfying those desires; I allude to those who are as you once were, in a state called rude and savage, the exact reverse of civilization: whose intellectual energies, those which they possess above the mere feelings of brute instinct, have never been directed to the cultivation of that knowledge, which the brute from his organization can never attain. And I think we may safely assume, as a self-evident truth, that is, a truth rushing with overwhelming weight and conviction on the mind of every man, who for one moment fairly uses his reasoning powers, those very powers which alone distinguish him from

the animal genera, and no more to be resisted than the certainty that I am now speaking, that every individual of the genus Homo, or man, comes from his mother's womb, endowed of natural and inalienable right, by virtue of his prerogative as a formation of Nature, and heir to such a portion of her concomitant gifts, (the pabula or continuances of existence, which are air and food, and clothing and fuel, if dwelling in such part of his maternal territory, as shall render a covering and defence from her other inevitable powers necessary to preserve that existence), as shall enable him to keep up the economy of animal life, on an equal footing with every other of his genus.

And, that as it is equally self-evident and notorious, that not a particle of such food or raiment can be obtained from any other source than the lap of Nature, the Earth's surface; such surface must, and does, necessarily constitute a joint fund, a common stock, from whence every individual by the rights inseparably annexed to his being, shall procure just so much food as shall suffice to appease his natural cravings, that is, to eat and drink to satiety; and to grow thereon articles of clothing.

But further, that as many parts of the

Earth's surface are unfertile, that is, do not bear as indigenous, any wholesome food, or will not bear such without recourse to artifice, to cultivation, and in many instances will not produce it then: and that as man, from organic structure is unsuited for solitude, particularly from infantine helplessness, is gregarious, or inclined to associate with his genus, and by reason of intellect derives pleasurable emotion therefrom; it was to be conjectured, and facts prove the conjecture right, that he would in a state of social compact dwell on or near the spots where he found food indigenous, or where by the aid of art discovered by observation, I mean cultivation, he could most easily raise such food; and if locally necessary, also such coverings from the inclemency of the elements. And, lastly, I submit as a consequent drawn from these precedents, that as man is mortal, and after constituting a part of universal matter and motion for a limited period, loses the onceproperties of his being; is decomposed as an animal, and in turn succeeded here by his own offspring, a part of his own organic matter, and therefore inheriting the same natural rights so appertaining to him; he cannot by Natural Right acquire any control over any part of the reservoir of food and clothing

before-mentioned, for a longer period than the term of his own animal existence; but by the terms of such existence loses such his portion, the instant he parts with that very being, to which at his production it was annexed as an inseparable incident.

Now, granting these data to be founded on abstract principles of truth and right reason; and assuming as incontrovertible the existence of misery and want in the mass of mankind, even in their best state of society; and, be it known to you the latter is asserted to exist in absolute purity in this very city; and of our having seen to-day an exhibition of glaring contrasts, and heard a clash of jarring extremes; of having witnessed an evident excess of possession in one man, of absolute destitution in another; what shall we be bound to declare? to what solemn conclusion are we drawn? to the proof of what existences do all these things tend? to this, and nothing else—that the only natural order of things is positively inverted by means direct and indirect: that there is something unnatural, complex, and wrong, at the bottom of the system; something which never had, nor by any possibility can have any connexion, or reference with the fixed principles of Reason and Nature: which causes the system itself to heave and boil with