defence.

Our poor friend Lenny drew plenty of this stuff from the tinker's bag.
He thought it very clever and very eloquent; and he supposed the
statistics were as true as mathematical demonstrations.

A famous knowledge-diffuser is looking over my shoulder, and tells me,
"Increase education, and cheapen good books, and all this rubbish will
disappear!" Sir, I don't believe a word of it. If you printed Ricardo
and Adam Smith at a farthing a volume, I still believe that they would be
as little read by the operatives as they are nowadays by a very large
proportion of highly-cultivated men. I still believe that, while the
press works, attacks on the rich and propositions for heave-a-hoys will
always form a popular portion of the Literature of Labour. There's Lenny
Fairfield reading a treatise on hydraulics, and constructing a model for
a fountain into the bargain; but that does not prevent his acquiescence
in any proposition for getting rid of a National Debt, which he certainly
never agreed to pay, and which he is told makes sugar and tea so
shamefully dear. No. I tell you what does a little counteract those
eloquent incentives to break his own head against the strong walls of the
Social System,--it is, that he has two eyes in that head which are not
always employed in reading. And having been told in print that masters
are tyrants, parsons hypocrites or drones in the hive, and landowners
vampires and bloodsuckers, he looks out into the little world around him,
and, first, he is compelled to acknowledge that his master is not a
tyrant (perhaps because he is a foreigner and a philosopher, and, for
what I and Lenny know, a republican). But then Parson Dale, though High
Church to the marrow, is neither hypocrite nor drone. He has a very good
living, it is true,--much better than he ought to have, according to the
"political" opinions of those tracts! but Lenny is obliged to confess