(1852, November 2) The Evening Courant, p. 3.Philosophical Institution Public Lecture—29 October 1852, Segment 2.
means can a nation be supplied except by the hands of strenuous and successful industry. In speaking in these terms, I am not forgetful of those primitive periods of our history which our poets have celebrated as the golden age, when poverty was synonymous with integrity—when to live in a hollow tree was evidence of a contented mind, and to feed on acorns and other spontaneous products of the earth was to be innocent and pure. But however pleasing these pictures of man's early condition may be to the imagination, they labour under one great defect—they are not true. Since the fall of our first father, there is no authentic record of any people or of any tribe occupying at once a position of the high moral culture and of low physical refinement: on the contrary, wherever poverty has most abounded, wherever man has been worst supplied with the good things of this life, there has he ever been most a prey to his own sanguinary and brutalizing passions. It is not in the untamed savage, the hardy hunter of the American wilderness,—"the stoic of the woods," as Campbell calls him—"the man without a tear," that we are to look for the pattern and the paragon of our species. If we do so, we shall find, in the language of Wordsworth, "not that pure archetype of human greatness," but, in his stead,
"A creature squalid, vengeful, and impure;
Remorseless, and submissive to no law
But superstitious fear, and abject sloth."
Indeed it stands to reason that mankind can make no progress in the arts of civilisation, but must remain unsusceptible of moral culture, so long as they are weighed down to the earth by the anxieties inseparable from a condition in which the very humblest means of subsistence are scanty, precarious, and hard-wrung. What moral and intellectual advancement can be expected from a man whose every hour is filled up with solicitude in regard to the alleviation of his lowest bodily wants, and whose condition forbids that he should exercise his ingenuity in any other way than in contriving expedients—expedients clumsy, and often unsuccessful—by which the ever-returning pangs of hunger may be appeased? In such circumstances it is obvious that the moral and intellectual improvements of our species is altogether out of the question; and hence it has been remarked by one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, that the origin of science and of art, of literature and philosophy, and also, it might be added, of correct moral sentiment, was to be dated from the time when a considerable portion of the community being discharged from the necessity of toiling daily with their own hands for their daily bread, were left free to cultivate those liberal and intellectual pursuits on which the amelioration of our race and the true prosperity of nations so essentially depend. But no such emancipation is practicable until the powers of industry have been organised and her energies put forth in such a way as to ensure the abundant production of the various commodities of which human beings stand in need. When this organisation has taken place—when industry has been systematically exerted and successfully applied, the accumulation of wealth is the result: and then, but not till then, do men become inspired
