To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you
come to that. At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one
question in modern home politics, though it appears in many shapes,
and that is the question of money; and but one political remedy,
that the people should grow wiser and better. My workmen fellow-
passengers were as impatient and dull of hearing on the second of
these points as any member of Parliament; but they had some
glimmerings of the first. They would not hear of improvement on
their part, but wished the world made over again in a crack, so
that they might remain improvident and idle and debauched, and yet
enjoy the comfort and respect that should accompany the opposite
virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could see,
that many of them were now on their way to America. But on the
point of money they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far
as they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual
income; a question which should long ago have been settled by a
revolution, they did not know how, and which they were now about to
settle for themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the
Atlantic in a steamship of considerable tonnage.
And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income
question is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided,
if there be no wisdom and virtue to profit by the change. It is
not by a man's purse, but by his character that he is rich or poor.
Barney will be poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let
them go where they will, and wreck all the governments under
heaven, they will be poor until they die.
Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing. It has to me been always something of a relief to find
the poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work. I can
in consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better
grace. The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from
his childhood up. He excused himself for his defective education
on the ground that he had been overworked from first to last. Even
now, he said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a
book. In consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was
occupied for four or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of
the twenty-four, and then principally in walking; and the remainder
of the day he passed in born idleness, either eating fruit or
standing with his back against a door. I have known men do hard
literary work all morning, and then undergo quite as much physical
fatigue by way of relief as satisfied this powerful frontiersman
for the day.
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