were now on their way to America. But on the
point of money they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far as
they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual income; a
question which should long ago have been settled by a revolution, they
did not know how, and which they were now about to settle for
themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the Atlantic in a
steamship of considerable tonnage.

And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income question
is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided, if there be no
wisdom and virtue to profit by the change. It is not by a man's purse,
but by his character, that he is rich or poor. Barney will be poor,
Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them go where they will,
and wreck all the governments under heaven; they will be poor until they
die.

Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing. It has to me been always something of a relief to find the
poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in
consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better grace.
The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his
childhood up. He excused himself for his defective education on the
ground that he had been overworked from first to last. Even now, he
said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a book. In
consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was occupied for four
or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of the twenty-four, and
then principally in walking; and the remainder of the day he passed in
sheer idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his back against
the door. I have known men do hard literary work all morning, and then
undergo quite as much physical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied
this powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at least, like all the
educated class, did so much homage to industry as to persuade himself he
was industrious. But the average mechanic recognises his idleness with
effrontery; he has even, as I am told, organised it.

I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact. A man
fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought into
hospital with broken bones. He was asked what was his trade, and replied
that he was a _tapper_. No on