Page:The social and moral elevation of our working classes.pdf/2

 there is any very large amount of diabolical wickedness in the world. Men do wrong because their moral nature is neglected.

Man, in one respect, is placed in a worse position, so far as regards his conduct in life, than the brute creation. These are guided by an unerring instinct, which seems to need little education to enable them rightly to perform the purposes of their creation. Man's guide is a much higher and nobler faculty, which we call reason. But this faculty needs to be carefully educated; and because this necessary education is neglected, we are continually going astray and wandering out of the road to true happiness. Education of a high order is therefore the first matter to be attended to, if we would elevate ourselves and our working classes. Leave them in ignorance of the laws which govern their being, and they must ever remain at a low point in the social and moral scale.

Much has been attempted, and much has been done during the last fifty years, to improve the condition of our working classes. A deeper interest in their welfare has been manifested by those classes of society whom fortune and other circumstances surrounded with more of the comforts and luxuries of life. A better, a truer education of the wealthy, has taught them to acknowledge a closer tie of consanguinity with the poor; and hence has arisen a desire—a new-born yearning—to raise all to a nearer level, and to a more general possession of the blessings and comforts which civilization ought to bring in her train, but which she has not yet succeeded in placing within the reach—or rather in conferring upon, for they are within their reach—of the toilers of our population, the builders up of all the comforts and luxuries enjoyed by the intellectual and the enlightened minority.

I have, in some of the previous essays which I have offered to our Society, pointed out from our Metropolitan Police returns, and