The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States/Section V
SECTION V.
THEIR MINDS UNCULTIVATED.
However ill-furnished the poor are in most civilised countries, in respect to sustenance, clothing, &c., they are still more neglected with regard to their minds; they indeed are excluded from all kind of improvement of their mental faculties. It is even by many supposed that all such knowledge would be prejudical to them; that is, as they are to be worked as irrational animals, there is no reason why their rational faculties should be cultivated. And, indeed, if this their situation were necessarily such, and were unavoidable, and if it were not such through our injustice and cruelty to them, our fellow-creatures, and were such as could admit of no alteration or amendment, it would in that case, perhaps, be better that they should be brought up in ignorance, as they are; since they would, by any degree of knowledge, see more clearly, and feel more acutely, what they suffer, and the want of the comforts and happiness of which they are deprived. If they remain for ever the mere carriers of wood and water, they cannot certainly be kept too ignorant. But these poor wretches, I think, have a right, before they give up all the advantages of rational creatures, to expect a better reason for it, than that those things always were so. They have a right to expect that so great a difference in their lot and condition should not be made, unless indicated by nature itself, and made evident by its having refused them the faculties and powers for the acquisition of knowledge.
There are two methods of acquiring knowledge: the one, by thinking or meditation—that is, by the operations of our own minds within themselves; the other, by informing ourselves of the knowledge already acquired by others, which is done by books or living masters. Both of these methods the commonalty are debarred from. One should have thought the former might have been allowed them: that is not, however, the case; for to do that requires leisure, which is refused the poor man. Leisure, in a poor man, is thought quite a different thing from what it is to a rich man, and goes by a different name. In the poor, it is called idleness, the cause of all mischief. If it is so, why is it so? Because they have been, by this cruel system, deprived of opportunities of acquiring such rudiments as would qualify them for further attainments; that is to say, they are not to have leisure, because they have never had any to fit them to improve by such leisure. Most part of the manufacturing trades just occupy the mind so as to exclude all other ideas on which it might operate.
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment "of the far greater part of those live by labour—that is, the great body of the people—comes to be confined to a very few simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for human nature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and, consequently, of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of life.
"It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are called, of hunters, shepherds, or even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity which, in a civilised society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of the people."—Adam Smith, vol. iii., p. 183.