As soon as the urchin pauper can totter out of doors, it is taught to
pull off its hat, and pull its hair to the quality. "A good little boy,"
says the squire; "there's a ha'penny for you." The good little boy glows
with pride. That ha'penny instils deep the lesson of humility. Now goes
our urchin to school. Then comes the Sunday teaching,--before church,
which enjoins the poor to be lowly, and to honour every man better off
than themselves. A pound of honour to the squire, and an ounce to the
beadle. Then the boy grows up; and the Lord of the Manor instructs him
thus: "Be a good boy, Tom, and I'll befriend you. Tread in the steps of
your father; he was an excellent man, and a great loss to the parish; he
was a very civil, hard-working, well-behaved creature; knew his station;
--mind, and do like him!" So perpetual hard labour and plenty of cringing
make the ancestral virtues to be perpetuated to peasants till the day of
judgment! Another insidious distillation of morality is conveyed through
a general praise of the poor. You hear false friends of the people, who
call themselves Liberals and Tories, who have an idea of morals half
chivalric, half pastoral, agree in lauding the unfortunate creatures whom
they keep at work for them. But mark the virtues the poor are always to
be praised for,--industry, honesty, and content. The first virtue is
extolled to the skies, because industry gives the rich everything they
have; the second, because honesty prevents an iota of the said everything
being taken away again; and the third, because content is to hinder these
poor devils from ever objecting to a lot so comfortable to the persons
who profit by it. This, my pupils, is the morality taught by the rich to
the poor!



EMULATION.