was of opinion that much of this might be accomplished “within two generations.”  Social improvement is always very slow.  How extremely tardy has been the progress of civilization!  How gradually have its humanizing influences operated in elevating the mass of the people!  It requires the lapse of generations before its effects can be so much as discerned:  for a generation is but as a day in the history of civilization.  It has cost most nations ages of wars, before they could conquer their right of existence as nations.  It took four centuries of persecutions and martyrdoms to establish Christianity, and two centuries of civil wars to establish the Reformation.  The emancipation of the bondsmen from feudal slavery was only reached through long ages of misery.  From the days in which our British progenitors rushed to battle in their war-paint,—­or those more recent times when the whole of the labouring people were villeins and serfs, bought and sold with the soil which they tilled,—­to the times in which we now live,—­how wide the difference, how gratifying the contrast.  Surely it ought not to be so difficult to put an end to the Satanic influences of thriftlessness, drunkenness, and improvidence!

CHAPTER IV.

MEANS OF SAVING.

“Self-reliance and self-denial will teach a man to drink out of his own cistern, and eat his own sweet bread, and to learn and labour truly to get his own living, and carefully to save and expend the good things committed to his trust.”—­Lord Bacon.

“Love, therefore, labour:  if thou should’st not want it for food, thou may’st for physic.  It is wholesome for the body, and good for the mind; it prevents the fruit of idleness.”—­William Penn.

“The parent who does not teach his child a trade, teaches him to be a thief.”—­Brahminical Scriptures.

Those who say that “It can’t be done,” are probably not aware that many of the working classes are in the receipt of incomes considerably larger than those of professional men.

That this is the case, is not, by any means, a secret.  It is published in blue-books, it is given in evidence before parliamentary committees, it is reported in newspapers.  Any coal-owner, or iron-master, or cotton-spinner, will tell you of the high wages that he pays to his workpeople.

Families employed in the cotton manufacture are able to earn over three pounds a week, according to the number of the children employed.[1] Their annual incomes will thus amount to about a hundred and fifty pounds a year,—­which is considerably larger than the incomes of many professional men—­higher than the average of country surgeons, higher than the average of the clergy and ministers of all denominations, higher than the average of the teachers of common schools, and probably higher than the average income of the middle classes of the United Kingdom generally.