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!