Page:The English housekeeper, 6th.djvu/411

Rh plot of ground for a couple of hours, and where the children are bred up to respect the edges of the borders, the twigs of the shrubs, and the stems of the flowers, and to be industrious and even delighted in such things, it is natural that the mother should take the same pains with all that belongs to the inside of the dwelling. And, accordingly, those who have occasionally visited the poor of the rural districts of England, must have observed, that if they are often deficient in the means of living well, they are, as often, patterns of cleanliness, and as anxious to make a respectable appearance with their scanty furniture, to polish their half dozen pewter platters, to scrub their plain table or dresser, to keep clean and to set in order their few cups and saucers of china-ware, as their betters are to make a display of the greatest luxuries of life. These excellent habits of the people are so fixed, that we see a portion of them still clinging to those labourers, perhaps the most of all to be commiserated, who are employed in the factories of the north of England.

But the condition of the other class is very different. Some of these have never, from their earliest infancy, been accustomed to any of those scenes in which, though there be difficulties, there are circumstances to excite perseverance, and to reward painstaking. These are born in absolute want; their experience under the roof of their parents has been but a course of destitution; and they go forth into the world rather as fugitives from misery than as seekers to be more prosperous. If they obtain employment, their labour is perhaps repaid by wages barely sufficient to keep them alive; destitute of the means of practising anything like household management, never having known what it is to have a home, worthy to be so called, for a single day, it is scarcely possible for them to obtain that knowledge, simple as it is, which is required to contrive the various modes of making much out of a little. Besides, if the poor people existing in this condition were ever so inclined to do well, there are the strongest inducements held out to them to mismanage their small stock of means; they are continually standing in need of some temporary sustenance; and, who can wonder if thus bereft of all power to provide or to economise, they yield to destruction, and suffer themselves to be allured by the