nor can any great advance be made while every nerve has to be strained to keep the people from absolute starvation.  And this is what happens every winter....  What a monstrous thing it is that in the richest country in the world, large masses of the population should be condemned annually, by a natural operation of nature, to starvation and death.  It is all very well to say, how can it be helped?  Why, it was not so in our grandfathers’ time.  Behind us they were in many ways, but they were not met every winter with the spectacle of starving thousands.  The fact is, we have accepted the marvellous prosperity which has in the last twenty years been granted us, without reflecting on the conditions attached to it, and without nerving ourselves to the exertion and the sacrifices which their fulfilment demands.”

And yet Mr. Denison clearly saw that if the people were sufficiently educated, and taught to practise the virtue of Thrift, much of this misery might be prevented.  “The people,” he elsewhere says, “create their destitution and their disease.  Probably there are hardly any of the most needy who, if they had been only moderately frugal and provident, could not have placed themselves in a position to tide over the occasional months of want of work, or of sickness, which there always must be....  I do not underrate the difficulty of laying by out of weekly earnings, but I say it can be done.  A dock-labourer, while a young, strong, unmarried man, could lay by half his weekly wages, and such men are almost sure of constant employment.”

After showing how married men might also save, Mr. Denison goes on to say, “Saving is within the reach of nearly every man, even if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it were of anything like common occurrence, the destitution and disease of this city would be kept within quite manageable limits.  And this will take place.  I may not live to see it, but it will be within two generations.  For, unfortunately, this amount of change may be effected without the least improvement in the spiritual condition of the people.  Good laws, energetically enforced, with compulsory education, supplemented by gratuitous individual exertion (which will then have a much reduced field and much fairer prospects), will certainly succeed in giving the mass of the people so much light as will generally guide them into so much industry and morality as is clearly conducive to their bodily ease and advancement in life.”

The difference in thriftiness between the English workpeople and the inhabitants of Guernsey is thus referred to by Mr. Denison:  “The difference between poverty and pauperism is brought home to us very strongly by what I see here.  In England, we have people faring sumptuously while they are getting good wages, and coming on the parish paupers the moment those wages are suspended.  Here, people are never dependent upon any support but their own; but they live, of their own free will, in a style of frugality