Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/71

 He used his pen in the cause, as well as his voice. And there was bite in his writing, as these sentences from an article in the Working Man's Friend will show. "What," he asks, "can be more ridiculously grotesque than for a Government to weep over the ignorance of its subjects, and tax knowledge to the tune of a million? Were it not for the cruelty and wickedness of the thing, its bare mention would make us laugh for a month. The clergy are, forsooth, in throes over the ignorance of the masses; the dissenters, too, cry day and night because of the deplorable degradation of the masses; my Lord Ashley and the Ragged School folks cannot sleep for the horror that these 'untutored savages' excite. Some of them are so deeply moved that they are even asking whether it might not be worth while to have fewer hounds and puppies and more schools; still, so tremendous a sacrifice must not be made without due deliberation. Parliament is touched to its very core on this momentous point, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is full of sympathy and benevolence; and the glorious result is that knowledge is taxed upwards of a million a year, and less than one-tenth of the ill-gotten treasure is given back to the people. This conduct on the part of the Government, clergy, dissenters, patriots, and philanthropists is not only inconsistent, but it is very oppressive, irreligious, and cruel."

When Gladstone abolished the Paper Duty in 1861, the work of the associations came to a glad end. Cassell was with them to the close, and subscribed to the fund for winding up the accounts and to the testimonial to Milner Gibson.

Cassell first went to America on Temperance business. In 1853 he represented the National Temperance Society at the World's Temperance Convention in New York, and, though he stayed only a few weeks, was there long enough to be stirred by the anti-slavery agitation. He went across again in the spring of 1854 to investigate the conditions of the publishing trade in the United States. This