Old Red Sandstone: New Walks in an Old Field

My advice to young working-men, desirous of bettering their circumstances, and adding to the amount of their enjoyment, is a very simple one. Do not seek happiness in what is misnamed pleasure; seek it rather in what is termed study. Keep your consciences clear, your curiosity fresh, and embrace every opportunity of cultivating your minds. You will gain nothing by attending Chartist meetings. The fellows who speak nonsense with fluency at these assemblies, and deem their nonsense eloquence, are totally unable to help either you or themselves; or, if they do succeed in helping themselves, it will be all at your expense. Leave them to harangue unheeded, and set yourselves to occupy your leisure hours in making yourselves wiser men. Learn to make a right use of your eyes: the commonest things are worth looking at—even stones and weeds, and the most familiar animals. Head good books, not forgetting the best of all: there is more true philosophy in the Bible than in every work of every sceptic that ever wrote; and we would be all miserable creatures without it, and none more miserable than you. You are jealous of the upper classes; and perhaps it is too true that, with some good, you have received much evil at their hands. It must be confessed they have hitherto been doing comparatively little for you, and a great deal for themselves. But upper and lower classes there must be, so long as the world lasts; and there is only one way in which your jealousy of them can be well directed. Do not let them get ahead of you in intelligence. It would be alike unwise and unjust to attempt casting them down to your own level, and no class would suffer more in the attempt than yourselves; for you would only be clearing the way, at an immense expense of blood, and under a tremendous pressure of misery, for another and perhaps worse aristocracy, with some second Cromwell or Napoleon at their head. Society, however, is in a state of continual flux: some in the upper classes are from time to time going down, and some of you from time to time mounting up to take their places—always the more steady and intelligent among you, remember; and if all your minds were cultivated, not merely intellectually, but morally also, you would find yourselves, as a body, in the possession of a power which every charter in the world could not confer upon you, and which all the tyranny or injustice of the world could not withstand.

I intended, however, to speak rather of the pleasure to be derived, by even the humblest, in the pursuit of knowledge, than of the power with which knowledge in the masses is invariably accompanied. For it is surely of greater importance that men should receive accessions to their own happiness, than to the influence which they exert over other men. There is none of the intellectual, and none of the moral faculties, the exercise of which does not lead to enjoyment; nay, it is chiefly in the active employment of these that all enjoyment consists; and hence it is that happiness bears so little reference to station. It is a truth which has been often told, but very little heeded or little calculated upon, that though one nobleman may be happier than another, and one laborer happier than another, yet it cannot be at all premised of their respective orders, that the one is in any degree happier than the other. Simple as the fact may seem, if universally recognized, it would save a great deal of useless discontent, and a great deal of envy. Will my humbler readers permit me at once to illustrate this subject, and to introduce the chapters which follow, by a piece of simple narrative? I wish to show them how possible it is to enjoy much happiness in very mean employments. Cowper tells us that labor, though the primal curse, "has been softened into mercy;" and I think that, even had he not done so, I would have found out the fact for myself.