Page:The Poor Rich Man, and the Rich Poor Man.djvu/162

154 you think, setting aside the greater compensation our working-men get than yours, they are happier!"

"That is setting aside a vast deal, sir. This superior compensation represents the comforts of life, the means of education. What could Aikin have been in my country with his shattered health, his children, and helpless father-in-law, and invalid sister? These independent dependants would have been tenants of the almshouse—Aikin himself, most probably, there, and his children supported by the parish. When I see, sir, that a man so conditioned can bring up a family as he does, in such a city as this——his boys to be intelligent and independent citizens, and his daughters to be respectable, well-informed wives and mothers,—I must think this, sir, the happiest country in the world for the labouring man."

"I believe you are right; but we do not make the most of our privileges. There is no telling what a nation, with our institutions, might become, if the domestic virtues were better understood and practised by the labouring classes,—if their foundation were laid in religion, and children were brought up from their cradles to be temperate and true, and industrious and frugal,—if every opportunity were seized for improving them in knowledge, and in the practice of the soul-preserving virtues. The rich here can make no separating lines which the poor cannot pass. It is the poor who fence themselves in with ignorance, and press themselves down with shiftlessness and vice. If there were more such families as this, the rich would feel less exultation in their wealth, the poor that there was no degradation in their