Thrift by Samuel Smiles
page 52 of 419 (12%)
page 52 of 419 (12%)
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beforehand for inevitable distress. To provide only for the present, is
the sure means to sacrificing the future. What hope can there be for a people whose only maxim seems to be, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die"? All this may seem very hopeless; yet it is not entirely so. The large earnings of the working classes is an important point to start with. The gradual diffusion of education will help them to use, and not abuse, their means of comfortable living. The more extended knowledge of the uses of economy, frugality, and thrift, will help them to spend their lives more soberly, virtuously, and religiously. Mr. Denison was of opinion that much of this might be accomplished "within two generations." Social improvement is always very slow. How extremely tardy has been the progress of civilization! How gradually have its humanizing influences operated in elevating the mass of the people! It requires the lapse of generations before its effects can be so much as discerned: for a generation is but as a day in the history of civilization. It has cost most nations ages of wars, before they could conquer their right of existence as nations. It took four centuries of persecutions and martyrdoms to establish Christianity, and two centuries of civil wars to establish the Reformation. The emancipation of the bondsmen from feudal slavery was only reached through long ages of misery. From the days in which our British progenitors rushed to battle in their war-paint,--or those more recent times when the whole of the labouring people were villeins and serfs, bought and sold with the soil which they tilled,--to the times in which we now live,--how wide the difference, how gratifying the contrast. Surely it ought not to be so difficult to put an end to the Satanic influences of thriftlessness, drunkenness, and improvidence! |
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