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.
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