It is no relief to their miserable
circumstances; it is only an insult to their miserable understandings.
It arises from a total want of charity or a total want of thought. Want
of one kind was never relieved by want of any other kind. Patience,
labor, sobriety, frugality, and religion should be recommended to them;
all the rest is downright _fraud_. It is horrible to call them "the
_once happy_ laborer."
Whether what may be called the moral or philosophical happiness of the
laborious classes is increased or not, I cannot say. The seat of that
species of happiness is in the mind; and there are few data to ascertain
the comparative state of the mind at any two periods. Philosophical
happiness is to want little. Civil or vulgar happiness is to want much
and to enjoy much.
If the happiness of the animal man (which certainly goes somewhere
towards the happiness of the rational man) be the object of our
estimate, then I assert, without the least hesitation, that the
condition of those who labor (in all descriptions of labor, and in all
gradations of labor, from the highest to the lowest inclusively) is, on
the whole, extremely meliorated, if more and better food is any standard
of melioration. They work more, it is certain; but they have the
advantage of their augmented labor: yet whether that increase of labor
be on the whole a _good_ or an _evil_ is a consideration that would lead
us a great way, and is not for my present purpose.
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