sell them, or countenance them; and except through him, as “master of the industrial situation,” nothing could be bought, or sold, or countenanced.  The landlord could do nothing with his acres except let them to him; the capitalist’s hoard rotted and dwindled until it was lent to him; the worker’s muscles and brain were impotent until sold to him.  What king’s son would not exchange with me—­the son of the Great Employer—­the Merchant Prince?  No wonder they proposed to imprison me for treason when, by applying my inherited business talent, I put forward a plan for securing his full services to society for a few hundred a year.  But pending the adoption of my plan, do not describe him contemptuously as a vulgar tradesman.  Industrial kingship, the only real kingship of our century, was his by divine right of his turn for business; and I, his son, bid you respect the crown whose revenues I inherit.  If you don’t, my friend, your book won’t pay.

I hear, with some surprise, that the kindness of my conduct to Henrietta (my first wife, you recollect) has been called in question; why, I do not exactly know.  Undoubtedly I should not have married her, but it is waste of time to criticise the judgment of a young man in love.  Since I do not approve of the usual plan of neglecting and avoiding a spouse without ceasing to keep up appearances, I cannot for the life of me see what else I could have done than vanish when I found out my mistake.  It is but a short-sighted policy to wait for the mending of matters that are bound to get worse.  The notion that her death was my fault is sheer unreason on the face of it; and I need no exculpation on that score; but I must disclaim the credit of having borne her death like a philosopher.  I ought to have done so, but the truth is that I was greatly affected at the moment, and the proof of it is that I and Jansenius (the only other person who cared) behaved in a most unbecoming fashion, as men invariably do when they are really upset.  Perfect propriety at a death is seldom achieved except by the undertaker, who has the advantage of being free from emotion.

Your rigmarole (if you will excuse the word) about the tombstone gives quite a wrong idea of my attitude on that occasion.  I stayed away from the funeral for reasons which are, I should think, sufficiently obvious and natural, but which you somehow seem to have missed.  Granted that my fancy for Hetty was only a cloud of illusions, still I could not, within a few days of her sudden death, go in cold blood to take part in a grotesque and heathenish mummery over her coffin.  I should have broken out and strangled somebody.  But on every other point I—­weakly enough—­sacrificed my own feelings to those of Jansenius.  I let him have his funeral, though I object to funerals and to the practice of sepulture.  I consented to a monument, although there is, to me, no more bitterly ridiculous outcome of human vanity than the blocks raised to tell posterity that John