Note 4 — LETTER XXVIII.

“Strengthen authority,” “enforce discipline”! What ugly expressions these! and a “whole hamlet,” though it be a little one, “the property of the Edgeworths”! How long are such things yet to be? thinks my Republican correspondent, I suppose—from whom, to my regret, I have had no further dispatch since I endeavoured to answer his interrogations.4 Only, note further respecting this chief question of the right of private property, that there are two kinds of ownership, which the Greeks wisely expressed in two different ways: the first, with the word which brought me to a pause in St. John’s Gospel, ‘idios,’ signifying the way, for instance, in which a man’s opinions and interests are his own; ‘idia,’ so that by persisting in them, independently of the truth, which is above opinion, and of the public interest, which is above private, he becomes what we very properly, borrowing the Greek word, call an ‘idiot.’ But their other phrase expresses the kind of belonging which is nobly won, and is truly and inviolably ours, in which sense a man may learn the full meaning of the word ‘Mine’ only once in his life,—happy he who has ever so learnt it. I was thinking over the prettiness of the word in that sense, a day or two ago, and opening a letter, mechanically, when a newspaper clipping dropped out of it (I don’t know from what paper), containing a quotation from the ‘Cornhill Magazine’ setting forth the present privileges of the agricultural labourer attained for him by modern improvements in machinery, in the following terms:—