"We walked together to Derby that day. At the meeting he spoke a
little, and pleased the people. When the meeting was over, he said:--
"'Can't I sleep with you?'
"'Well,' I said, 'I have no objection; but, you know, _I_ am only a
lodger.'
"However, go with me he _would_, and _did_. That was the man. When
John made up his mind to do a thing he did it; and to that feature in
his character, no doubt, much of his future success may be attributed.
The gentleman at whose house he met me at Nottingham, and who was
ashamed of him, subsequently became his servant, and touched his hat
to him; and John has pulled up at my own door in his carriage, with a
liveried servant, when I lived near to him in London."
John Cassell was now in the thick of the fight. In those days the
opposition to the Gospel of Temperance was keen and bitter. Sometimes
there were great disturbances at the meetings, sometimes he was pelted
with rubbish, at times he did not know where to turn for a night's
lodging. It was, on the whole, a fierce conflict; but John was nothing
daunted.
It is, of course, impossible to sum up the amount of a man's
influence. John Cassell scattered the seed of temperance liberally.
Here is a case showing how one of the grains took root, and grew up to
bear important fruit.
The Rev. Charles Garrett, the celebrated teetotal President of the
Wesleyan Conference, writing several years after John Cassell's death,
says:--
"I signed the pledge of total abstinence in 1840, after hearing a
lecture on the subject by the late John Cassell. I have therefore
tried it for more than thirty years. It has been a blessing to me, and
has made me a blessing to others."
How to cure the curse of drink, what to give in its place when the
pleasures of the glass were taken away--that was the problem which
many have tried to solve. None more successfully than John Cassell.
At a meeting in Exeter Hall he suddenly put a new view before his
audience. "I have it!" he exclaimed.
"The remedy is education. Educate the working men and women, and you
have a remedy for the crying evil of the country. Give the people
mental food, and they will not thirst after the abominable drink which
is poisoning them."
He had hitherto been doing something to assist the temperance cause
by the sale of tea and coffee, and he now turned his attention to the
issue of publications calculated to benefit the cause.
Having, at the age of twenty-four, married Mary Abbott, he became
possessed of additional means for carrying out his publishing schemes.
Cheap illustrated periodicals began to issue from the press under his
superintendence, and copies were multiplied by the hundred thousand.
He never forgot that he had been a working man, and one of the first
publications he started was called _The Working Man's Friend_.
It is not necessary to say more. Though John Cassell died
comparatively young--he was only forty-eight when his death took place
in 1865--he had done a grand life's work; and the soundness of his
judgment is shown by the fact that works which he planned retain their
hold upon the people to this day.
John Cassell had his ambitions, but they were of a very simple kind.
"I started in life with one ambition," he said, "and that was to have
a clean shirt every day of my life; this I have accomplished now for
some years; but I have a second ambition, and that is to be an MAP.,
and represent the people's cause; then I shall be public property,
and you may do what you like with me." This latter desire he would
doubtless have realised but for his early decease.
"A BRAVE, FEARLESS SORT OF LASS."