mechanics may, in exceptional cases, be exposed to want; but I can as little doubt that the cases are exceptional, and that much of the suffering of the class is a consequence either of improvidence on the part of the competently skilled, or of a course of trifling during the term of apprenticeship, quite as common as trifling at school, that always lands those who indulge in it in the hapless position of the inferior workman.”

It is most disheartening to find that so many of the highest paid workmen in the kingdom should spend so large a portion of their earnings in their own personal and sensual gratification.  Many spend a third, and others half their entire earnings, in drink.  It would be considered monstrous, on the part of any man whose lot has been cast among the educated classes to exhibit such a degree of selfish indulgence; and to spend even one-fourth of his income upon objects in which his wife and children have no share.

Mr. Roolmck recently asked, at a public meeting,[1] “Why should the mail who makes L200 or L300 a year by his mechanical labour, be a rude, coarse, brutal fellow?  There is no reason why he should be so.

[Footnote 1:  Meeting of the Mechanics’ Institutes at Dewsbury, Yorkshire.]

Why should he not be like a gentleman?  Why should not his house be like my house?  When I go home from my labour, what do I find?  I find a cheerful wife—­I find an elegant, educated woman.  I have a daughter; she is the same.  Why should not you find the same happy influences at home?  I want to know, when the working man comes from his daily labour to his home, why he should not find his table spread as mine is spread; why he should not find his wife well dressed, cleanly, loving, kind, and his daughter the same?...  We all know that many working men, earning good wages, spend their money in the beerhouse and in drunkenness, instead of in clothing their wives and families.  Why should not these men spend their wages as I spend my small stipend, in intellectual pleasures, in joining with my family in intellectual pursuits?  Why should not working men, after enjoying their dinners and thanking God for what they have got, turn their attention to intellectual enjoyments, instead of going out to get drunk in the nearest pothouse!  Depend on it these things ought to go to the heart of a working man; and he is not a friend to the working man who talks to him and makes him believe that he is a great man in the State, and who don’t tell him what are the duties of his position.”

It is difficult to account for the waste and extravagance of working people.  It must be the hereditary remnant of the original savage.  It must be a survival.  The savage feasts and drinks until everything is gone; and then he hunts or goes to war.  Or it may be the survival of slavery in the State.  Slavery was one of the first of human institutions.  The strong man made the weak man work for him.  The warlike race subdued the less warlike race, and made them their slaves.  Thus slavery existed from the earliest times.  In Greece and Rome the righting was done by freemen, the labour by helots and bondsmen.  But slavery also existed in the family.  The wife was the slave of her husband as much as the slave whom he bought in the public market.