``Catherine's Scale of Ranks'':---``Bentham or Dumont, on Pensions of Retreat?''---which you please.---You ask my present thoughts:---I am all obedience. Allow me only to name the place. Not in your work, but let it be in a sequel I am preparing for it. From that which you have so kindly made yours, those wicked thoughts would scare away readers, whom, if content with what you give them from my first friend, that sequel may have a chance for. In that production may be seen, not in description only, but in terminis, the arrangements, which, after from forty to fifty years for reflection, exhibit the practical---I do not say the now practicable---result of the principles of yours: and that cleared (forgive my saying so) of what now shows itself to me as dross. Nor yet will it draw readers from yours;---for in yours alone will be found discussions, explanations, and reasonings at length; in the new one (except where the opposite officially avowed principles are examined) little else than results.
Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized. In these words you have the title of a plan of official economy and education that gives denomination to the whole, and an indication of the matter of the first and principal part. Send your readers, if you have any, to that work. There, with official economy, and official education, they may see national growing out of it---added, and that without need of additional description or expense. There, confronted with Radical, they may see Whig and Tory economy, and take their choice. I say Whig and Tory; for these two are one.
As to Catherine and her ranks, they rank not quite so high with me now as then. Pensions of retreat would be invited to make their retreat from your pages, were it not for my respect for editors and readers. In my own work may be seen a picture of them, painted in those colours which now appear to me their proper ones.
``Revise?'' Impossible: not to speak of my doing you more harm than good. In the French alone, the ``Pensions of Retreat'' have already cost me---I had almost said lost me---more days than I can endure to think of: I who have so few left, and work enough left for a hundred times the number. What I have found possible, I have done,---looking over the titles of the chapters and sections (still in the French alone) and, in relation to them, submitting what appears to me an appropriate wording, together with some little alterations and additions which presented themselves to me as amendments.