Don’t let reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay
hold of the working boys and young men of England by any educational
grapnel whatever, which hasn’t some _bona fide_ equivalent for the
games of the old country “veast” in it; something to put in the place
of the back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the
muscles of men’s bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make
them rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive
plans which I see, this is all left out: and the consequence is, that
your great Mechanics’ Institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your
Christian Young Men’s Societies in religious Pharisaism.
Well, well, we must bide our time. Life isn’t all beer and skittles—but
beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form
a good part of every Englishman’s education. If I could only drive
this into the heads of you rising Parliamentary Lords, and young
swells who “have your ways made for you,” as the saying is—you, who
frequent palaver houses and West-end Clubs, waiting always to strap
yourselves on to the back of poor dear old John Bull, as soon as the
present used-up lot (your fathers and uncles), who sit there on the
great Parliamentary-majorities’ pack-saddle, and make believe they’re
grinding him with their red-tape bridle, tumble, or have to be lifted
off!
I don’t think much of you yet—I wish I could; though you do go talking
and lecturing up and down the country to crowded audiences, and are
busy with all sorts of philanthropic intellectualism, and circulating
libraries and museums, and heaven only knows what besides, and try to
make us think, through newspaper reports, that you are, even as we,
of the working classes. But, bless your hearts, we ain’t so “green,”
though lots of us of all sorts toady you enough certainly, and try to
make you think so.
I’ll tell you what to do now: instead of all this trumpeting and fuss,
which is only the old Parliamentary-majority dodge over again—just you
go, each of you (you’ve plenty of time for it, if you’ll only give up
the other line), and quietly make three or four friends, real friends,
among us. You’ll find a little trouble in getting at the right sort,
because such birds don’t come lightly to your lure—but found they may
be. Take, say, two out of the professions, lawyer, parson, doctor—which
you will; one out of trade, and three or four out of the working
classes, tailors, engineers, carpenters, engravers—there’s plenty of
choice. Let them be men of your own ages, mind, and ask them to your
homes; introduce them to your wives and sisters, and get introduced to
theirs; give them good dinners, and talk to them about what is really
at the bottom of your hearts, and box, and run, and row with them, when
you have a chance. Do all this honestly as man to man, and by the time
you come to ride old John, you’ll be able to do something more than sit
on his back, and may feel his mouth with some stronger bridle than a
red-tape one.
Ah, if you only would! But you have got too far out of the right rut,
I fear. Too much over-civilization, and the deceitfulness of riches.
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. More’s the
pity. I never came across but two of you who could value a man wholly
and solely for what was in him; who thought themselves verily and
indeed of the same flesh and blood as John Jones, the attorney’s clerk,
and Bill Smith, the costermonger, and could act as if they thought so.