en of the same or higher rank, living from their birth in this very
region, are indifferent to those objects around them in which a
cultivated taste takes so much pleasure. I should not have detained the
reader so long upon this point, had I not heard (glad tidings for the
directors and traffickers in shares!) that among the affluent and
benevolent manufacturers of Yorkshire and Lancashire are some who
already entertain the thought of sending, at their own expense, large
bodies of their workmen, by railway, to the banks of Windermere. Surely
those gentlemen will think a little more before they put such a scheme
into practice. The rich man cannot benefit the poor, nor the superior
the inferior, by anything that degrades him. Packing off men after this
fashion, for holiday entertainment, is, in fact, treating them like
children. They go at the will of their master, and must return at the
same, or they will be dealt with as transgressors.

A poor man, speaking of his son, whose time of service in the army was
expired, once said to me, (the reader will be startled at the
expression, and I, indeed, was greatly shocked by it), 'I am glad he has
done with that _mean_ way of life.' But I soon gathered what was at the
bottom of the feeling. The father overlooked all the glory that attaches
to the character of a British soldier, in the consciousness that his
son's will must have been in so great a degree subject to that of
others. The poor man felt where the true dignity of his species lay,
namely, in a just proportion between actions governed by a man's own
inclinations and those of other men; but, according to the father's
notion, that proportion did not exist in the course of life from which
his son had been released. Had the old man known from experience the
degree of liberty allowed to the common soldier, and the moral effect of
the obedience required, he would have thought differently, and had he
been capable of extending his views, he would have felt how much of the
best and noblest part of our civic spirit was owing to our military and
naval institutions, and that perhaps our very existence as a free people
had by them been maintained. This extreme instance has been adduced to
show how deeply seated in the minds of Englishmen is their sense of
personal independence. Master-manufacturers ought never to lose sight of
this truth. Let them consent to a Ten Hours' Bill, with little or, if
possible, no diminution of wages, and t