Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 1).djvu/386

338 a more wide prospect opens to my view. I cannot avoid, little as it may appear to have any thing to do with your present situation, to talk to you on the subject. It intimately concerns the well-being of your children, and your children's children, and will perhaps more than any thing prove to you the advantage and necessity of being thoughtful, sober, and regular; of avoiding foolish and idle talk, and thinking of yourselves, as of men who are able to be much wiser and happier than you now are; for habits like these, will not only conduce to the successful putting aside your present and immediate grievances, but will contain a seed, which in future times will spring up into the tree of liberty, and bear the fruit of happiness.

There is no doubt but the world is going wrong, or rather that it is very capable of being much improved. What I mean by this improvement is, the inducement of a more equal and general diffusion of happiness and liberty.—Many people are very rich and many are very poor. Which do you think are happiest?—I can tell you that neither are happy, so far as their station is concerned. Nature never intended that there should be such a thing as a poor man or a rich one. Being put in an unnatural situation, they can neither of them be happy, so far as their situation is concerned. The poor man is born to obey the rich man, though they both come into the world equally helpless, and equally naked. But the poor man does the rich no service by obeying him—the rich man does the poor no good by commanding him. It would be much better if they could be prevailed upon to live equally like brothers—they would ultimately both be happier. But