Note 5 — LETTER LXXII.

Truly it is hard for you to hear the low knocking in the hubbub of your Vanity Fair. You are living in the midst of the most perfectly miscreant crowd that ever blasphemed creation. Not with the old snap-finger blasphemy of the wantonly profane, but the deliberate blasphemy of Adam Smith: ‘Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods.’ Here’s one of my own boys getting up that lesson beside me for his next Oxford examination. For Adam Smith is accepted as the outcome of Practical Philosophy, at our universities; and their youth urged to come out high in competitive blasphemy. Not the old snap-finger sort,5 I repeat, but that momentary sentiment, deliberately adopted for a national law. I must turn aside for a minute or two to explain this to you.