It is probable this unhappiness of their condition, oftener than any other cause, brings God into their thoughts, and that as a being against whom they have a complaint approaching to a quarrel on account of it. And this strongly assists the reaction against whatever would enforce the sense of guilt on the conscience. When he has done so little for us, (something like this is the sentiment,) he cannot think it any such great matter if wedosometimes come a little short of his commands. There is no doubt that their recollections of him as a being to murmur against for their allotment, are more frequent, more dwelt upon, and with more of an excited feeling, than their recollections of him as a being whom they ought to have loved and served, but have offended against. The very idea of such offence, as the chief and essential constituent of wickedness, is so slightly conceived, (because he is invisible, and has his own felicity, and is secure against all injury,) that if the thoughts of one of these personsshould, by some rare occasion, be forced into the direction of unwillingly seeing his own faults, it is probable his impiety would appear the most inconsiderable thing in the account; that he would easily forgive himself the negation of all acts and feelings of devotion towards the Supreme Being, and the countless multiplications of insults to him by profane language.
To conclude this part of the melancholy statement; it may be observed of the class in question, that they have but very little notion of guilt, or possible guilt, in anything but external practice. That busy interior existence, which is the moral person, genuine and complete; the thoughts, imaginations, volitions; the motives, projects, deliberations, devices, the indulgence of the ideas of what they cannot or dare not practically realize,—all this, we have reason to believe, passes nearly exempted from jurisdiction, even of that feeble and undecisive kind whichmayoccasionally attempt an interference with their actions. They do indeed take such notice of the quality of these things within, as to be aware that some of them are not to be disclosed in their communications; which prudential caution has of course little to do with conscience, when the things so withheld are internally cherished in perfect disregard of the Omniscient Observer, and with hardly the faintest monition that the essence of the guilt is the same, with only a difference in degree, in intending or deliberately desiring an evil, and in acting it.
It is not natural obtuseness of mental faculty that we are attributing, all this while, to the uneducated class of our people, in thus exposing the defectiveness of their discernment between right and wrong. If it were, there might arise somewhat of the consolation afforded in contemplating some of the very lowest of the savage tribes of mankind, by the idea that such outcasts of the rational nature must stand very nearly exempt from accountableness, through absolute natural want of mind. But in the barbarians of our country we shall often observe a very competent, and now and then an abundant, share of native sense. We may see it evinced in respect to the very questions of morality, in cases where they are quite compelled, as will occasionally happen, to feel themselves brought within the cognizance of one or other of its plainest rules. In such cases we have witnessed a sharpness and activity of intellect claiming almost our admiration. What contrivance of deception and artful evasion. What dexterity of quibble, and captious objection, and petty sophistry. What vigilance to observe how the plea in justification or excuse takes effect, and, if they perceive it does not succeed, what address in sliding into a different one. What quickness to avail themselves of any mistake, or apparent concession, in the examiner or reprover. What copious rhetoric in exaggeration of the cause which tempted to do wrong, or of the great good hoped to be effected by the little deviation from the right,—a good surely enough to excuse so trifling an impropriety. What facility of placing between themselves and the censure, the recollected example of some good man who has been "overtaken in a fault."
Hereismind, after all, we have been prompted to exclaim; mind educating itself to evil, in default of that discipline which should have educated it to good. How much of the wisdom of evil, (if we may be allowed the expression,) there is faculty enough in the neglected corrupt popular mass of this nation to attain, by the exercise into which the individual's mind is carried by its own impulse, and in which he may everywhere and every hour find ample co-operation. Each of these self-improvers in depraved sense has the advantage of finding himself among a great tribe of similar improvers, forming an immense school, as if for the promotion of this very purpose; where they all teach by a competition in learning; where the rude faculty which is not expanded into intelligence is, however, sharpened into cunning; where the spirit which cannot grow into an eagle, may take the form and action of a snake. This advantage,—that there should not be a diminution of the superabundant plenty of associates always at hand, to assist each man in making the most of his native intellect for its least worthy use,—has been from age to age secured to our populace, as if it had been the most valuable birthright of Englishmen. Whatever else the person born to the inheritance of low life was destined to find in it, the national state had made as sure to him as it had before made the same privilege to his ancestors, that the generality of his equals should be found fit and ready to work with him in the acquirement of a depraved shrewdness.
But while the bulk of the people have been, in every period, abandoned to such a process of educating themselves and one another, where has been that character of parental guardianship, which seems to be ascribed when poets, orators, and patriots, are inspired with tropes, and talk of England and her children? This imperial matron of their rhetoric seems to have little cared how much she might be disgraced in the larger portion of her progeny, or how little cause they might have to all eternity to remember her with gratitude. She has had far other concern about them, and employment for them, than that of their being taught the value of their spiritual nature, and carefully trained to be enlightened, good, and happy. Laws against crime, it is true, she has enacted for them in liberal quantity; appointed her quorums of magistrates; and not been sparing of punishments. She has also maintained public sabbath observances to remind them of religion, of which observances she cared not that they little understood the very terms; except when the reading of a Book of Sports was appointed an indispensable part at one time long after her adoption of the Reformation. But she might plainly see what such provisions didnotaccomplish. It was a glaring fact before her eyes, that the majority of her children had far more of the mental character of a colony from some barbarian nation, than of that which an enlightened and Christian state might have been expected to impart. She had most ample resources indeed for supplying the remedy; but, provided that the productions of the soil and the workshop were duly forthcoming, she thought it of no consequence, it should seem, that the operative hands belonged to degraded minds. And then, too, as at all times, her lofty ambition destined a good proportion of them to the consumption of martial service, she perhaps judged that the less they were trained to think, the more fit they might be to be actuated mechanically, as an instrument of blind impetuous force. Or perhaps she thought it would be rather an inconsistency, to be making much of the inner existence of a thing which was to be, in frequent wholesale lots, sent off to be cut or dashed to pieces. [Footnote: "Killed off," was the sentimental phrase emitted in parliament, in easy unconsciousness of offence, by the accomplished senator named in a former page. He probably was really unaware that the creatures were made for anything better.] And besides, a certain measure of instruction to think, especially if consisting, in a considerable part, of the inculcation of religion, might have done something to disturb that notion, (so worthy to have been transferred from the Mohammedan creed,) which she was by no means desirous to expel from her fleets and armies, that death for "king and country" clears off all accounts for sin.
Let our attention be directed a little while to the effects of the privation of knowledge, as they may be seen conspicuous in the several parts of the economy of life, in the uneducated part of the community. Observe those people in their daily occupations. None of us need be told that, of the prodigious diversity of manual employments, some consist of, or include, operations of such minuteness or complexity, and so much demanding nicety, arrangement, or combination, as to necessitate the constant and almost entire attention of the mind; nor that all of them must require its full attention at times, at particular stages, changes, and adjustments, of the work. We allow this its full weight, to forbid any extravagant notion of how much it is possible to think of other things during the working time. It is however to be recollected, that persons of a class superior to the numerous one we have in view, take the chief share of those portions of the arts and manufactures which require the most of mental effort,—those which demand extreme precision, or inventive contrivance, or taste, or scientific skill. We may also take into the account of the allotment of employments to the uncultivated multitude, how much facility is acquired by habit, how much use there is of instrumental mechanism, (a grand exempter from the responsibility that would lie on the mind,) and how merely general and very slight an attention is exacted in the ordinary course of some of the occupations. These things considered, we may venture perhaps to assume, on an average of those employments, that the persons engaged in them might be, as much at least as one third part of the time, without detriment to the manual performance, giving the thoughts to other things with attention enough for such interest as would involve improvement. This is particularly true of the more ordinary parts of the labors of agriculture, when not under any critical circumstances, or special pressure owing to the season.
But as the case at present is, what does become, during such portion of the time, of the ethereal essence which inhabits the corporeal laborer, this spirit created, it is commonly said and without contradiction, for thought, knowledge, religion, and immortality? If we be really to believe this doctrine of its nature and destiny, (for we are not sure that politicians think so,) can we know without regret, that in very many of the persons in the situations supposed, it suffers a dull absorption, subsides into the mere physical nature, is sunk and sleeping in the animal warmth and functions, and lulled and rocked, as it were, in its lethargy, by the bodily movements, in the works which it is not necessary for it to keep habitually awake to direct? And its obligation to keep just enough awake to see to the right performance of the work, seems to give a licensed exemption from any other stirring of its faculties. The employmentis something to be minded, in a general way, though but now and then requiring a pointed attention; and therefore this said intellectual being, if uninformed and unexercised, will feel no call to mind anything else: as a person retained for some service which demands but occasionally an active exercise, will justify the indolence which declines taking in hand any other business in the intervals, under the pretext that he has his appointment; and so, when not under the immediate calls of that appointment, he will trifle or go to sleep, even in the full light of day, with an easy conscience.
But here we are to beware of falling into the inadvertency of appearing to say, that the laboring classes, in this country and age, have actually this full exemption, during their employments, from all exercise of thought beyond that which is immediately requisite for the right performance of their work. It is true that there is little enough of any such mental activity directed to the instructive uses we were supposing. But while such partial occupation of the thoughts (of course it is admitted, in an irregular and discontinuous, but still a beneficial manner) with topics and facts of what may be called intellectual and moral interest as we are assuming to be compatible with divers of the manual operations, is a thing to which most among the laboring classes are strangers, many of them are equally strangers to an easy vacancy of mind; experiencing amidst their employments a severe arrest of those thoughts which the mere employment itself may leave free. During the little more than mechanical action of their hands and eyes, the circumstances of their condition press hard into their minds. The lot of many of those classes is placed in a melancholy disproportion between whatmustbe given to the cares and toils for a bare subsistence, and whatcan, at most, be given to the interests of the nobler part of their nature, either during their work or in its intervals. It is a sad spectacle to behold so many myriads of spiritual beings, (proviso, again, that we may call them so without being suspected to forget that their proper calling is to work with their hands,) doomed to consume a proportion so little short of the whole of their vigor and time, in just merely supporting so many bodies in the struggle to live.
When it is in special relation to the present times that we speak of this struggle to live, we of course mean by it something more than that circumstance of the general lot of humanity which is expressed in the sentence, "In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread," We put the emphasis on the peculiar aggravation of that circumstance in this part of the world in this and recent times, by the adventitious effect of some dreadful disorder of the social economy, in consequence of which the utmost exertions of the body and mind together but barely suffice in so many cases, in some hardly do suffice, for the mere protraction of life; comfortable life being altogether out of the question. The course of the administration of the civilized states, and the recent dire combustion into which they have almost unanimously rushed, as in emulation which of them should with the least reserve, and with the most desperate rapidity, annihilate the resources that should have been for the subsistence and competence of their people, have resulted in such destitution and misery in this country as were never known before, except as immediately inflicted by the local visitation of some awful calamity. The state of very many of our people, at this hour, is nearly what might be conceived as the consequence of a failure of the accustomed produce of the earth. [Footnote: No exaggeration at the time when it was written. The condition of the working classes during the subsequent years does not admit of any comprehensive uniform description. It has suffered successive harassing fluctuations, and been probably at all times severely distressing in one part of the country or another.]
There is no wish to deny or underrate the additions made to the evil by the intervention of causes, whose operation admits of being traced in some measure distinctly from the effect of this grand one. They may be traced in an operation which isdistinguishable; and referable to each respectively; but it were most absurd to represent them as working out of connection, or otherwise than subordinately concurring, with that cause which has invaded with its pernicious effects everything that has an existence or a name in the social system. And it were simply monstrous to attribute the main substance of so wide and oppressive an evil to causes of any debateable quality, while there is glaring in sight a cause of stupendous magnitude, whichcould not possibly do otherwise thanproduce immense and calamitous effects. It would be as if a man were prying about for this and the other cause of damage, to account for the aspect of a region which has recently been devastated by inundations or earthquakes. It has become much a fashion to explain the distresses of a country on any principles rather than those that are taught by all history, and prominently manifest in the nature of things. And airs of superior intelligence shall be assumed on hearing a plain man fix the main charge of national exhaustion and distress on the nation's consuming its own strength in an unquenchable fury to destroy that of others; just as if such madness had never been known to result in poverty and distress, and it were perfectly inexplicable how it should. This is partly an affectation of science, accompanied, it is likely, by somewhat of that sincere extravagance with which some newly developed principle is apt to be accounted the comprehension of all wisdom, a nostrum that will explain everything. But we suspect that in many instances this substitution of subordinate causes for a great substantial one, proceeds from something much worse than such affectation or self-duped extravagance. It is from a resolute determination that ambition shall be the noblest virtue of a state; that martial glory shall maintain its ground in human idolatry and that wars and their promoters shall be justified at all hazards.
We were wishing to show how the laboring people's thoughts might be partly employed, during their daily task, and consistently with industry and good workmanship. But what a state of things is exhibited where the very name of industry, the virtue universally honored, the topic of so many human and divine inculcations, cannot be spoken without offering a bitter insult; where the heavy toil, denounced on man for his transgression, in the same sentence as death, is in vain implored as the greatest privilege; or thought of in despair, as a blessing too great to be attainable; and when the reply of the artisan to an unwitting admonition, that even amidst his work he might have some freedom for useful thinking, may be, "Thinking! I have no work to confine my thinking; I may, for that, employ it all on other subjects; but those subjects are, whether I please or not, the plenty and luxury in which many creatures of the same kind as myself are rioting, and the starvation which I and my family are suffering."
We hope in Providence, more than in any wisdom or disposition shown by men, that this melancholy state of things will be alleviated, otherwise than by a reduction of number through the diseases generated by utter penury. [Footnote: Ithasbeen alleviated; but not till after a considerable duration. In England it has; but look at Ireland?] We trust the time will come when the Christian monitor shall no longer be silenced by the apprehension of such a reply to the suggestion he wishes to make to the humble class, that they should strive against being reduced to mere machines amidst their manual employments; that it is miserable to have the whole mental existence shrunk and shrivelled as it were to the breadth of the material they are working upon; that the noble interior agent, which lends itself to maintain the external activity, and direct the operations required of the bodily powers for the body's welfare, has eminently a right and claim to have employments on its own account, during such parts of those operations as do not of necessity monopolize its attention. It may claim, in the superintendence of these, a privilege analogous to that possessed in the general direction of subordinate agents by a man of science, who will interfere as often as it is necessary, but will not give up all other thought and employment to be a constant mere looker-on, during such parts of the operations as are of so ordinary a nature that he could not really fix his attention on them.
But how is the mind of the laborer or artisan to be delivered from the blank and stupified state, during the parts of his employment that do not necessarily engross his thoughts? How, but by its having within some store of subjects for thought; something for memory, imagination, reflection; in a word, by the possession of knowledge? How can it be sensibly alive and active, when it is placed fully and decidedly out of communication with all things that are friendly to intellectual life, all things that apply a beneficial stimulus to the faculties, all things, of this world or another, that are the most inviting or commanding to thought and emotion? We can imagine this ill-fated spirit, especially if by nature of the somewhat finer temperament, thus detached from all vital connection, secluded from the whole universe, and inclosed as by a prison wall,—we can imagine it sometimes moved with an indistinct longing for its appropriate interests; and going round and round by this dark, dead wall, to seek for any spot where there might be a chance of escape, or any crevice where a living element for the soul transpires; and then, as feeling it all in vain, dejectedly resigning itself again to its doom. Some ignorant minds have instinctive impulses of this kind; though far more of them are so deeply stupified as to be habitually safe from any such inquietude. But let them have received, in their youth and progressively afterwards, a considerable measure of interesting information, respecting, for instance, the many striking objects on the globe they inhabit, the memorable events of past ages, the origin and uses of remarkable works within their view, remaining from ancient times; the causes of effects and phenomena familiar to their observation as now unintelligible facts; the prospects of man, from the relation he stands in to time, and eternity, and God, explained by the great principles and facts of religion. Let there be fixed in their knowledge so many ideas of these kinds, as might be imparted by a comparatively humble education, (one quite compatible with the destination to a life of ordinary employment,) and even involuntarily the thoughts would often recur to these subjects, in those moments and hours when the manual occupation can, and actually will, be prosecuted with but little of exclusive attention. Slight incidents, casual expressions, would sometimes suggest these subjects; by association they would suggest one another. The mere reaction of a somewhat cultivated spirit against invading dulness, might recall some of the more amusing and elating ones; and they would fall like a gleam of sunshine on the imagination. An emotion of conscience, a self-reflection, an occurring question of duty, a monitory sensation of defective health, would sometimes point to the serious and solemn ones. The mind might thus go a considerable way, to recreate or profit itself, and, on coming back again, find all safe in the processes of the field or the loom. The man would thus come from these processes with more than the bare earnings to set against the fatigue. There would thus be scattered some appearances to entertain, and some sources and productions to refresh, over what were else a dead and barren flat of existence.
There is no romancing in all this; we have known instances of its verification to a very pleasing and exemplary extent. We have heard persons of the class in question tell of the exhilarating imaginations, or solemn reflections, which, through the reminiscences of what they had read in youth or more advanced years, had visited their minds; and put them, as it were, in communication for a while with diversified, remote, and elevated objects, while in their humble employments under the open sky or the domestic roof. And is not this, (if it be true, after all, that the intellectual, immortal nature is by emphasis the man,) is not this vastly better than that this mind should lie nearly as dormant, during the laborer's hours of business, as his attendant of the canine species shall be sometimes seen to do in the corner of the field where he is at work?
But perhaps it will be said, that the minds of the uncultivated order are not generally in this state of utter inanity during their common employments; but are often awake and busy enough in recollections, fancies, projects, and the tempers appropriate; and that they abundantly show this when they stop sometimes in their work to talk, or talk as they are proceeding in it. So much the stronger, we answer, the argument for supplying them with useful knowledge; for it were better their mental beingweresunk in lethargy, than busy among the reported, recollected, or imagined transactions, the wishes, and the schemings, which will be the most likely to occupy the minds of persons abandoned to ignorance, vulgarity, and therefore probably to low vice.
We may add to the representation, the manner in which they spend the part of their time not demanded for the regular, or the occasional, exercise of their industry. It is not to be denied that many of them have too much truth in their pleading that, with the exception of Sunday, they have little remission of their toils till they are so weary that the remainder of the time is needed for complete repose. This is particularly the case of the females, especially those who have the chief cares and the actual work of a family. Nevertheless, it is within our constant observation that a considerable proportion of the men, a large one of the younger men, in the less heavily oppressed divisions of our population, do in fact include, for substance, their manual employments within such limits of time, as often to leave several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please. And in what manner, for the most part, is this precious time expended by those of no mental cultivation? It is true, again, that in many departments of labor, a diligent exertion during even this limited space of the day, occasions such a degree of lassitude and heaviness as to render it almost inevitable, especially in certain seasons of the year, to surrender some moments of the spare time, beyond what is necessary for the humble repast, to a kind of listless subsidence of all the powers of both body and mind. But after all these allowances fully conceded, a great number in the class under consideration have in some days several hours, and in the whole six days of the week, on an average of the year, very many hours, to be given, as they choose, to useful purposes or to waste; and again we ask, where the mind itself has been left waste howisthat time mostly expended?
If the persons are of a phlegmatic temperament, we shall often see them just simply annihilating those portions of time. They will for an hour, or for hours together, if not disturbed by some cause from without, sit on a bench, or lie down on a bank or hillock, or lean on a wall, or fill the fire-side chair; yielded up to utter vacancy and torpor, not asleep perhaps, but more lost to mental existence than if they were; since the dreams, that would probably visit their slumbers, would be a more lively train of ideas than any they have awake. Of a piece with this is the habit, among many of this order of people, of giving formally to sleep as much as one-third part, sometimes considerably more, of the twenty-four hours. Certainly there are innumerable cases in which infirmity, care, fatigue, and the comfortlessness and penury of the humble dwelling, effectually plead for a large allowance of this balm of oblivion. But very many surrender themselves to this excess from destitution of anything to keep their minds awake, especially in the evenings of the winter. What a contrast is here suggested to the imagination of those who have read Dr. Henderson's, and other recent descriptions, of the habits of the people of Iceland!
These, however, are their most harmless modes of wasting the time. For, while we might think of the many hours merged by them in apathy and needless sleep, with a wish that those hours could be recovered to the account of their existence, we might well wish that the hours could be struck out of it which they may sometimes give, instead, to conversation; in parties where ignorance, coarse vulgarity, and profaneness, are to support the dialogue, on topics the most to their taste; always including, as the most welcome to that taste, the depravities and scandals of the neighborhood; while all the reproach and ridicule, expended with good-will on those depravities, have the strange result of making the censors the less disinclined themselves to practise them, and only a little better instructed how to do it with impunity. In many instances there is the additional mischief, that these assemblings for corrupt communication find their resort at the public-house, where intemperance and ribaldry may season each other, if the pecuniary means for the former ingredient can be afforded, even at the cost of distress at home.—But without including depravity of this degree, the worthlessness of the communications of a number of grossly ignorant associates is easy to be imagined; besides that most of us have been made judges of their quality by numberless occasions of unavoidably hearing samples of them.
In the finer seasons of the year, much of these leisure spaces of time can be expended out of doors; and we have still only to refer to every one's own observation of the account to which they are turned, in the lives of beings whose lot allows but so contracted a portion of time to be, at the best, applied directly to the highest purposes of life.—Here the hater of all such schemes of improvement, as would threaten to turn the lower order into what that hater may probably call Methodists, (a term we venture to interpret for him as meaning thoughtful beings and Christians,) comes in with a ready cant of humanity and commiseration. And why, he says, with an affected indignation of philanthropy, why should not the poor creatures enjoy a little fresh air and cheerful sunshine, and have a chance of keeping their health, confined as many of them are, for the greatest part of the time, in narrow, squalid rooms, unwholesome workshops, and every sort of disagreeable places and employments? Very true, we answer; and why should not numbers of them be collected in groups by the road-side, in readiness to find in whatever passes there occasions for gross jocularity; practising some impertinence, or uttering some jeering scurrility, at the expense of persons going by; shouting with laughter at the success of the annoyance, or tomakeit successful; and all this blended with language of profaneness and imprecation, as the very life of the hilarity? Or why should not the boldest spirits among them form a little conventicle for cursing, blaspheming, and blackguard obstreperousness in the street, about the entrance of one of the haunts of intoxication; where they are perfectly safe from that worse mischief of a gloomy fanaticism, with which they might have been smitten if seduced to frequent the meeting-house twenty paces off? Or why should not the children, growing into the stage called youth, be turned loose through the lanes, roads, and fields, to form a brawling, impudent rabble, trained by their association to every low vice, and ambitiously emulating, in voice, visage, and manners, the ruffians and drabs of maturer growth? Or why should not the young men and women collect in clusters, or range about or beyond the neighborhood in bands, for revel, frolic, and all kinds of coarse mirth; to come back late at night to quarrel with their wretched elders, who perhaps envy them their capacity for such wild gaieties and strollings, while rating them for their disorderly habits? We say where can be the harm of all this? What reasonable and benevolent man would think of making any objection to it? Reasonable and benevolent,—for these have been among the qualities boasted for the occasion by the opposers of any materially improved education of the people; while in such opposition they virtually avowed their willing tolerance of all that is here described.
We have allowed most fully the plea of how little time,comparatively, could be afforded to the concern of mental improvement by the lower classes from their indispensable employments; and also that of the consequent fatigue, causing a temporary incapacity of effort in any other way. But this latter plea cannot be admitted without great abatement in the case of our neglectedyoungpeople of the working classes; for when we advert to their actual habits, we see that, nevertheless, time, strength, and wakefulness, and spring and spirit for exertion,arefound for a vast deal of busy diversion, much of it blended with such folly as tends to vice.
If such is the manner in which the spare time of the week-days goes to waste and worse, the Sunday is welcomed as giving scope for the same things on a larger scale. It is very striking to consider, that several millions, we may safely assert, of our English people, arrived at what should be years of discretion, are almost completely destitute of any manner of conscience respecting this seventh part of time; not merely as to any required consecration of it to religion, but as to its being under any claim or of any worth at all, otherwise than for amusement. It is actually regarded by them as a section of time far less under obligation than any other. They take it as so absolutely at their free disposal, by a right so exclusively vested in their taste and will, that a demand made even in behalf of their own most important interests, is contemptuously repelled as a sanctimonious impertinence. If the idea occurs at all (with multitudes it never does) of claims which they have heard that God should make on the hours, it is dismissed with the thought that it really cannot signify to him how creatures, condemned by his appointment to toil all the rest of the week, may wish to spend this one day, on which the secular taskmaster manumits them, and He, the spiritual one, might surely do as much. An immense number pay no attention whatever to any sort of religious worship; and many of those that do give an hour or two to such an observance, do so, some of them as merely a diversification of amusement, and the others by way of taking a license of exemption from any further accountableness for the manner in which they may spend the day. It is the natural consequence of all this, that there is more folly, if not more crime, committed on this than on all the other six days together.
Thus man, at leastignorantman, is unfit to be trusted with anything under heaven; since a remarkable appointment for raising the general tenor of moral existence, has with these persons the effect of sinking it. There is interposed, at frequent regular intervals throughout the series of their days, a richer vein, as it were, of time. The improvement of this, in a manner by no means strained to the austerity of exercise prescribed in the Puritan rules, might diffuse a worth and a grace over all the time between, and assist them against the tendency there may be in its necessary habits and employments, to depress the intelligent nature into meanness or debasement. The space which they are passing over is marked, at near intervals, with broad lines of a benignant light, which might spread an appearance of mild lustre over the whole extent as contemplated in retrospect; but how many, in looking back when near the end of their progress, have to perceive its general shade rendered darker by the very spaces where that light had been shed from heaven.
The Sundays of those who do not improve them to a good purpose, will infallibly be perverted to a bad one. But it were still a melancholy account if we could regard them as merely standing for nothing, as a blank in the life of this class of the people. It is a deeply unhappy spectacle and reflection, to see a man of perhaps more than seventy, sunk in the grossness and apathy of an almost total ignorance of all the most momentous subjects, and then to consider, that, since he came to an age of some natural capacity for the exercise of his mind, there have been more than three thousand Sundays. In their long succession they werehis time. That is to say, he had the property in them which every man has in duration; they were present to him, he had them, he spent them. Perhaps some compassionate friend may have been pleading in his behalf,—Alas! what opportunity, what time, has the poor mortal ever had? His lot has been to labor hard through the week throughout almost his whole life. Yes, we answer, but he has had three thousand Sundays; what would not even the most moderate improvement of so vast a sum of hours have done for him? But the ill-fated man, (perhaps rejoins the commiserating pleader,) grew up from his childhood in utter ignorance of any use he ought to make of time which his necessary employment would allow him to waste. There, we reply, you strike the mark. Sundays are of no value, nor Bibles, nor the enlarged knowledge of the age, nor heaven nor earth, to beings brought up in estrangement from all right discipline. And therefore we are pleading for the schemes and institutions which will notlethuman beings be thus brought up.
In so pleading, we happily can appeal to one fact in evidence that the intellectual and religious culture, in the introductory stages of life, tends to secure that the persons so trained shall be, when they are come to maturity, marked off from the neglected barbarous mass, by at least an external respect, but accompanied, we trust, in many of them, by a still better sentiment, to the means for keeping truth and duty constantly in their view. Observe the numbers now attending, with a becoming deportment, public worship and instruction, as compared with what the proportion is remembered or recorded to have been half a century since, or any time previous to the great exertions of benevolence to save the children of the inferior classes from preserving the whole mental likeness of their forefathers.
It can be testified also, by persons whose observation has been the longest in the habit of following children and youth from the instruction of the school institutions into mature life, that, in a gratifying number of instances, they have been seen permanently retaining too much love of improvement, and too much of the habit of a useful employment of their minds, to sink, in their ordinary daily occupations, into that wretched inanity we were representing; or to consume the free intervals of time in the listlessness, or worthless gabble, or vain sports, of which their neighbors furnished plenty of example and temptation.
These representations have partly included, what we may yet specify distinctly as one of the unhappy effects of gross ignorance—a degraded state of domestic society.
Whatever is of nature to render individuals uninteresting or offensive to one another, has a specially bad effect among them as members of a family; because there is in that form of community itself a peculiar tendency to fall below the level of dignified and complacent social life.—A number of persons cannot be placed in a state of social communication, without having a certain sense of claiming from one another a conduct meant and adapted to please. It is expected that a succession of efforts should be made for this purpose, with a willingness of each individual to forego, in little things, his own inclination or convenience. This is all very well when the society isvoluntary, and the parties can separate when the cost is felt to be greater than the pleasure. Under this advantage of being able soon to separate, even a company of strangers casually assembled will often recognize the claim and conform to the law; with a certain indistinct sentiment partaking of reciprocal gratitude for the disposition which is so accommodating. But the members of the domestic community also have each this same feeling which demands a mutual effort and self-denial to please, while the condition of their association is adverse to theiryieldingwhat they thus respectively claim. Theirs, when once it is formed, is not exactly a voluntary companionship, and it is one of undefinable continuance. The claim therefore seems as if it were to be of a prolongation interminable, while the grateful feeling for the concession is the less for the more compulsory bond of the association. And to be thus required, in a community which must not be dissolved, and in a series that reaches away beyond calculation, to exercise a self-restraint on their wills and humors in order to please one another, goes so hard against the great principle of human feeling—namely, each one's preference of pleasing himself—that there is an habitual impulse of reaction against the claim. This shows itself in their deportment, which has the appearance of a practical expression of so many individuals that theywillmaintain each his own freedom. Hence the absence, very commonly, in domestic society, of the attentiveness, the tone of civility, the promptitude of compliance, the habit of little accommodations, voluntary and supernumerary, which are so observable in the intercourse of friends, acquaintance, and often, as we have said, even of strangers.
And then consider, in so close a kind of community, what near and intimate witnesses they are of all one another's faults, weaknesses, tempers, perversities; of whatever is offensive in manner, or unseemly in habit; of all the irksome, humiliating, or sometimes ludicrous circumstances and situations. And also, in this close association, the bad moods, the strifes, and resentments, are pressed into immediate, lasting, corrosive contact with whatever should be the most vital to social happiness. If there be, into the account, the wants, anxieties, and vexations of severe poverty, they will generally aggravate all that is destructive to domestic complacency and decorum.
Now add gross ignorance to all this, and see what the picture will be. How many families have been seen where the parents were only the older and stronger animals than their children, whom they could teach nothing but the methods and tasks of labor. They naturally could not be the mere companions, for alternate play and quarrel, of their children, and were disqualified by mental rudeness to be their respected guardians. There were about them these young and rising forms, containing the inextinguishable principle, which was capable of entering on an endless progression of wisdom, goodness, and happiness! needing numberless suggestions, explanations, admonitions, brief reasonings, and a training to attend to the lessons of written instruction. But nothing of all this from the parent. Their case was as hopeless for receiving these necessaries of mental life, as the condition, for physical nutriment, of infants attempting to draw it, (we have heard of so affecting and mournful a fact,) from the breast of a dead parent. These unhappy heads of families possessed no resources for engaging youthful attention by mingled instruction and amusements; no descriptions of the most wonderful objects, or narratives of the most memorable events, to set, for superior attraction, against the idle stories of the neighborhood; no assemblage of admirable examples, from the sacred or other records of human character, to give a beautiful real form to virtue and religion, and promote an aversion to base companionship.
Requirement and prohibition must be a part of the domestic economy habitually in operation of course; and in such families you will have seen the government exercised, or attempted to be exercised, in the roughest, barest shape of will and menace, with no aptitude or means of imparting to injunction and censure, a convincing and persuasive quality. Not that the seniors should allow their government to be placed on such a ground that, in everything they enforce or forbid, they may be liable to have their reasons demanded by the children, as an understood condition of their compliance. Far from it; they will sometimes have to require a prescribed conduct for reasons not intelligible, or which it may not be discreet to explain, to those who are to obey. But their authority becomes odious, and as a moral force worse than inefficient, when the natural shrewdness of the children can descry that they reallyhaveno reasons better than an obstinate or capricious will; and infallibly makes the inference, that there is no obligation to submit, but that necessity which dependence imposes. But this must often be the unfortunate condition of such families.
Now imagine a week, month, or year, of the intercourse in such a domestic society, the course of talk, the mutual manners, and the progress of mind and character; where there is a sense of drudgery approaching to that of slavery, in the unremitting necessity of labor; where there is none of the interest of imparting knowledge or receiving it, or of reciprocating knowledge that has been imparted and received; where there is not an acre, if we might express it so, of intellectual space around them, clear of the thick, universal fog of ignorance; where, especially, the luminaries of the spiritual heaven, the attributes of the Almighty, the grand phenomenon of redeeming mediation, the solemn realities of a future state and another world, are totally obscured in that shade; where the conscience and the discriminations of duty are dull and indistinct, from the youngest to the oldest; where there is no genuine respect on the one side, nor affection unmixed with vulgar petulance and harshness, expressed perhaps in language of imprecation, on the other; where a mutual coarseness of manners and words has the effect, without their being aware of it as a cause, of debasing their worth in one another's esteem, all round; and where, notwithstanding all, they absolutely must pass a great deal of time together, to converse, to display their dispositions toward one another, and exemplify the poverty of the mere primary relations of life, as divested of the accessories which give them dignity, endearment, and conduciveness to the highest advantage of existence.
Home has but little to please the young members of such a family, and a great deal to make them eager to escape out of the house; which is also a welcome riddance to the elder persons, when it is not in neglect or refusal to perform allotted tasks. So little is the feeling of a peaceful cordiality created among them by their seeing one another all within the habitation, that, not unfrequently, the passer-by may learn the fact of their collective number being there, from the sound of a low strife of mingled voices, some of them betraying youth replying in anger or contempt to maturity or age. It is wretched to see how early this liberty is boldly taken. As the children perceive nothing in themindsof their parents that should awe them into deference, the most important difference left between them is that of physical strength. The children, if of hardy disposition, to which they are perhaps trained in battles with their juvenile rivals, soon show a certain degree of daring against their superior strength. And as the difference lessens, and by the time it has nearly ceased, what is so natural as that they should assume equality, in manners and in following their own will? But equality assumed where there should be subordination, inevitably involves contempt toward the party in defiance of whom it is asserted.
The relative condition of such parents as they sink in old age, is most deplorable. And all that has preceded, leads by a natural course to that consequence which we have sometimes beheld, with feelings emphatically gloomy,—the almost perfect indifference with which the descendants, and a few other relations, of a poor old man of this class, could consign him to the grave. A human being was gone out of the world, a being they had been with or near all their lives, some of them sustained in their childhood by his labors, and yet perhaps not one heart, at any moment, felt the sentiment—I have lost——. They never could regard him with respect, and their miserable education had not taught them humanity enough to regard him in his declining days as an object of pity. Some decency of attention was perhaps shown him, or perhaps hardly that, in his last hours. His being now a dead, instead of a living man, was a burden taken off; and the insensibility and levity, somewhat disturbed and repressed at the sight of his expiring struggle, and of his being lowered into the grave, recovered by the day after his interment, if not on the very same evening, their accustomed tone, never more to be interrupted by the effect of any remembrance of him. Such a closing scene one day to be repeated is foreshown to us, when we look at an ignorant and thoughtless father surrounded by his untaught children. In the silence of thought we thus accost him,—The event which will take you finally from among them, perhaps after forty or fifty years of intercourse with them, will leave no more impression on their affections, than the cutting down of a decayed old tree in the neighborhood of your habitation.
There are instances, of rare occurrence, when such a man becomes, late in life, far too late for his family to have the benefit of the change, a subject of the only influence which could awake him to earnest thoughtfulness and the full sensibility of conscience. When the sun thus breaks out toward the close of his gloomy day, and when, in the energy of his new life, he puts forth the best efforts of his untaught spirit for a little divine knowledge, to be a lamp to him in entering ere long the shades of death, with what bitter regrets he looks back to the period when a number of human beings, some perhaps still with him, some now scattered from him, and here and there pursuing their separate courses in careless ignorance, were growing up under his roof, within his charge, but in utter estrangement from all discipline adapted to ensure a happier sequel. His distressing reflection is often representing to him what they might now have been if they had grown up under such discipline. And gladly would he lay down his life to redeem for them but some inferior share of what the season for imparting to them is gone forever.
Another thing is to be added, to this representation of the evils attendant on an uncultivated state of the people, namely—thatthis mental rudeness puts them decidedly out of beneficial communication with the superior and cultivated classes.
We are assuming (with permission) that a national community should be constituted for the good of all its parts, not to be obtained by them as detached, independent portions, but adjusted and compacted into one social body; an economy in which all the parts shall feel they have the benefit of an amicable combination; in other words, that they are the better for one another. But it can be no such constitution when the most palpable relations between the two main divisions of society consist of such direct opposites as refinement and barbarism, dignity and gross debasement, intelligence and ignorance; which are the distinctions asserted by the higher classes as putting a vast distance between them and the lower. If so little of the correct understanding, the information, the liberalized feeling, and the propriety of deportment, which we are to ascribe to the higher and cultivated portion, goes downward into the lower, it should seem impossible but there must be more of repulsion than of amicable disposition and communication between them. We may suspect, perhaps, that those more privileged classes are not generally desirous that the interval were much less wide, provided that without cultivation of the lower orders the nuisance of their annoying and formidable temper could be abated. But however that may be, it is exceedingly desirable, for the good of both, that the upper and inferior ordersshouldbe on terms of communication and mutual good-will, and therefore that there should be a diminution of that rudeness of mind and habits which must contribute to keep them alienated and hostile.
If it were asked what communication, at all of a nature to be described by epithets of social and friendly import, we can be supposing by possibility to subsist between classes so different and distant, we may exemplify it by such an instance as we have now and then the pleasure of seeing. Each reader also, of any moderate compass of observation, may probably recollect an example, in the case of some man in humble station, but who has had (for his condition) a good education; having been well instructed in his youth in the elements of useful knowledge; having had good principles diligently inculcated upon him; having subsequently instructed himself, to the best of his very confined means and opportunity, through a habit of reading; and being in his manners unaffectedly observant of all the decorums of a respectable human being. It has been seen, that such a man has not found in some of his superiors in station and attainment any disposition to shun him; and has not felt in himself or his situation any reason why he should seek to shun them. He would occasionally fall into conversation with the wealthy and accomplished proprietor, or the professional man of learning, in the neighborhood. His intelligent manner of attending to what they said, his perfect understanding of the language naturally used by cultivated persons, the considerateness and pertinence of his replies, and the modest deference, combined with an honest freedom in making his observations on the matters brought in question, pleased those persons of superior rank, and induced various friendly and useful attentions, on their part to him and his family. He and his family thus experienced a direct benefit of superior sense, civility, and good principle, in a humble condition; and were put under a new responsibility to preserve a character for those distinctions.—Now think of the incalculable advantage to society, if anything approaching to this were the general state of social relation between the lower and the higher orders.
On the contrary, there is no medium of complacent communication between the classes of higher condition and endowment, and an ignorant, coarse populace. Except on occasion of giving orders or magisterial rebukes, the gentleman will never think of such a thing as converse with the clowns in his vicinity. They, on their part, are desirous to avoid him; excepting when any of them may have a purpose to gain, by arresting his attention, with an ungainly cringe; or when some of those who have no sort of present dependence on him, are disposed to cross his way with a look and strut of rudeness, to show how little they care for him. The servility, and the impudence, almost equally repress in him all friendly disposition toward a voluntary intercourse with the class. There is thus as complete a dissociation between the two orders, as mutual dislike, added to every imaginable dissimilarity, can create. And this broad ungracious separation intercepts all modifying influence that might otherwise have passed, from the intelligence and refinement of the one, upon the barbarism of the other.
But there is in human nature a pertinacious disposition to work disadvantages, in one way or other, into privileges. The people, in being thus consigned to a low and alien ground, in relation to the cultivated part of society, are put in possession, as it were, of a territory of their own; where they can give their disposition freer play, and act out their characters in their own manner; exempt equally from the voluntary and the involuntary influence of the cultivated superiors; that is to say, neither insensibly modified by the attraction of what is the most laudable in them as a pattern, nor swayed through policy to a studied accommodation to their understood opinion and will. This is a great emancipation enjoyed by the inferiors. And however injurious it may be, it is one of which they will not fail to take the full license. For in all things and situations, it is one of the first objects with human beings, to verify experimentally the presumed extent of their liberty and privilege. In this dissociation, the people are rid of the many salutary restraints and incitements which they would have been made to feel, if on terms of friendly recognition with the respectable part of the community; they have neither honor nor disgrace, from that quarter, to take into their account; and this contributes to extinguish all sense and care of respectability of character,—a care to which there will be no motive in any consideration of what they may, as among themselves, think of one another; for, with the low estimate which they mutually and justly entertain, there is a conventional feeling among them that, for the ease and privilege of them all, they are systematically to set aside all high notions and nice responsibilities of character and conduct. There is a sort of recognized mutualrightto be no better than they are. And an individual among them affecting a high conscientious principle would be apt to incur ridicule, as a man foolishly divesting himself of a privilege;—unless, indeed, he let them understand that hypocrisy was his way of maintaining that privilege, and turning it to account.
The people are thus, by their ignorance, and what inseparably attends it, far removed and estranged from the more cultivated part of their fellow-countrymen; and consequently from every beneficial influence under which a state of friendly contiguity, if we may so express it, would have placed them. Let us now see what, in this abandonment to themselves, are their growing dispositions toward the superior orders and the existing arrangements of the community; dispositions which are promoted by causes more definite than this estrangement considered merely as the negation of benevolent intercourse, but to which it mightily contributes.
Times may have been when the great mass, while placed in such decided separation from the upper orders, combined such a quietude with their ignorance, that they had little other than submissive feelings toward these superiors, whose property, almost, for all service and obsequiousness, they were accustomed to consider themselves; when no question would occur to them why there should be so vast a difference of condition between beings of the same race; when no other proof was required of the right appointment of their lot, however humble it might be, than their being, and their forefathers having been, actually in it; and when they did not presume, hardly in thought, to make any inferences from the fact of the immense disproportion of numbers and consequent physical strength between them and their superiors. [Footnote: Here, however, it should be observed that in the former age, when there was far less of jealous invidious feeling between the upper and lower classes than has latterly intervened, there was a more amicable manner of intercommunication. The settled and perfectly recognized state of subordination precluded on the one side, all apprehension of encroachment, and on the other the disposition to it.] But the times of this perfect, unquestioning, unmurmuring succumbency under the actual allotment have passed away; except in such regions as the Russian empire, where they have yet long to continue. In other states of Europe, but especially in our own, the ignorance of the people has nowhere prevented them from acquiring a sense of their strength and importance; with a certain ill-conceived, but stimulant notion, of some change which they think ought to take place in their condition. How, indeed, should it have been possible for them to remain unaware of this strength and importance, while the whole civilized world was shaken with a practical and tremendous controversy between the two grand opposed orders of society, concerning their respective rights; or that they should not have taken a strong, and from the rudeness of their mental condition, a fierce interest, in the principle and progress of the strife? And how should they have failed to know that, during this controversy, innumerable persons raised from the lower rank by talent and spirit, had left no place on earth except in courts (and hardly even there) for the dotage of fancying some innate difference between the classes distinguished in the artificial order of society?
The effect of all this is gone deep into the minds of great numbers who are not excited, in consequence, to any worthy exertion for raising themselves, individually, from their degraded condition, by the earnest application and improvement of their means and faculties. The feeling of many of them seems to be, that they must and will sullenly abide by the ill-starred fate of their order, till some great comprehensive alteration in their favor shall absolve them from that bond of hostile sentiment, in which they make common cause against the superior classes; and shall create a state of things in which it shall be worth while for the individual to make an effort to raise himself. We can at best, (they seem to say,) barely maintain, with the utmost difficulty, a miserable life; and you talk to us of cultivation, of discipline, of moral respectability, of efforts to come out from our degraded rank! No, we shall even stay where we are; till it is seen how the question is to be settled between the people of our sort, and those who will have it that they are of a far worthier kind. There may then, perhaps, be some chance for such as we; and if not, the less we are disturbed about improvement, knowledge, and all those things, the better, while we are bearing the heavy load a few years, to die like those before us.
We said they are banded in a hostile sentiment. It is true, that among such a degraded populace there is very little kindness, or care for one another's interests. They all know too well what they all are not, to feel mutual esteem or benevolence.
But it is infinitely easier for any set of human beings to maintain a community of feeling in hostility to something else, than in benevolence toward another; for here no sacrifice is required of anyone's self-interest. And it is certain, that the subordinate portions of society have come to regard the occupants of the tracts of fertility and sunshine, the possessors of opulence, splendor, and luxury, with a deep, settled, systematic aversion; with a disposition to contemplate in any other light than that of a calamity an extensive downfall of the favorites of fortune, when a brooding imagination figures such a thing as possible; and with but very slight monitions from conscience of the iniquity of the most tumultuary accomplishment of such a catastrophe. In a word, so far from considering their own welfare as identified with the stability of the existing social order, they consider it as something that would spring from the ruin of that order. The greater number of them have lost that veneration by habit, partaking of the nature of a superstition, which had been protracted downward, though progressively attenuated with the lapse of time, from the feudal ages into the last century. They have quite lost, too, in this disastrous age, that sense of competence and possible well-being, which might have harmonized their feelings with a social economy that would have allowed them the enjoyment of such a state, even as the purchase of great industry and care. Whatever the actual economy may have of wisdom in its institutions, and of splendor, and fulness of all good things, in some parts of its apportionment, they feel that what is allotted to most ofthemin its arrangements is pressing hardship, unremitting poverty, growing still more hopeless with the progress of time, and of what they hear trumpeted as national glory, nay, even "national prosperity and happiness unrivalled." This bitter experience, which inevitably becomes associated in their thoughts with that frame of society under which they suffer it, will naturally have a far stronger effect on their opinion of that system than all that had ever rendered them acquiescent or reverential toward it. That it brings no relief, or promise of relief, is a circumstance preponderating in the estimate, against all that can be said of its ancient establishment, its theoretical excellences, or the blessings in which it may be pretended to have once abounded, or still to abound. What were become of the most essential laws of human feeling, if such experiencecouldleave those who are undergoing its discipline still faithfully attached to the social order on the strength of its consecration by time, and of the former settled opinions in its favor,—however tenacious the impressions so wrought into habit are admitted to be? And the minds of the people thus thrown loose from their former ties, are not arrested and recovered by any substitutional ones formed while those were decaying. They are not retained in a temper of patient endurance and adherence, by the bond of principles which a sedulous and deep instruction alone could have enforced on them. The growth of sound judgment under such instruction, might have made them capable of understanding how a proportion of the evil may have been inevitable, from uncontrollable causes; of perceiving that it could not fail to be aggravated by a disregard of prudence in the proceedings in early life among their own class, and that so far it were unjust to impute it to their superiors or to the order of society; of admitting that national calamities are visitations of divine judgment, of which they were to reflect whether they had not deserved a heavy share; of feeling it to be therefore no impertinent or fanatical admonition that should exhort them to repentance and reformation, as an expedient for the amendment of even their temporal condition; and of clearly comprehending that, at all events, rancor, violence, and disorder, cannot be the way to alleviate any of the evils, but to aggravate them all. But, we repeat it, there are millions in this land, and if we include the neighboring island politically united to it, very many millions, who have received no instruction adequate, in the smallest degree, to counteract the natural effect of the distresses of their condition; or to create a class of moral restraints and mitigations in prevention of a total hostility of feeling against the established order, after the ancient attachments to it have been worn down by the innovations of opinion, and the pressure of continued distress.
Thus uninstructed to apprehend the considerations adapted to impose a moral restraint, thus unmodified by principles of mitigation, there is a large proportion of human strength and feeling not in vital combination with the social system, but aloof from it, looking at it with "gloomy and malign regard;" in a state progressive towards a fitness to be impelled against it with a dreadful shock, in the event of any great convulsion, that should set loose the legion of daring, desperate, and powerful spirits, to fire and lead the masses to its demolition. There have not been wanting examples to show with what fearful effect this hostility may come into action, in the crisis of the fate of a nation's ancient system; where this alienated portion of its own people, rushing in, have revenged upon it the neglect of their tuition; that neglect which had abandoned them to so utter a "lack of knowledge," that they really understood no better than to expect their own solid advantage in general havoc and disorder. But how bereft of sense theStatetoo must be, that would thusleta multitude of its people grow up in a condition of mind to believe, that the sovereign expedient for their welfare is to be found in spoliation and destruction! It might easily have comprehended what it was reasonable to expect from the matured dispositions and strength of such of its children as it abandoned to be nursed by the wolf.
While this principle of ruin was working on by a steady and natural process, this supposed infatuated State was, it is extremely possible, directing its chief care to maintain the splendor of a court, or to extort the means for prosecuting some object of vain and wicked ambition, some project of conquest and military glory. And probably nothing could have appeared to many of its privileged persons more idle and ridiculous, or to others of them more offensive and ill-intentioned, than a remonstrance founded on a warning of such a consequence. The despisers would have been incomparably the greater number; and, "Go (they would have said) with your mock-tragical fortune-telling, to whoever can believe, too, that one day or other the quadrupeds of our stalls and meadows may be suddenly inspirited by some supernatural possession to turn their strength on us in a mass, or those of our kennels to imitate the dogs of Actæon."