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.
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