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Untitled Article
than the trading class , and more with reference to public objects than any class . They are out of the great aristocratic current . The want of capital debars them from the prospect of becoming masters . The individual can scarcely be benefited but by public measures , which will benefit his fellow-labourers . Hence he attends to public measures . His chief selfishness is , that he c will stand by his order , ' as Mr . Brotherton nobly said in the
House of Commons on the Factory Bill ; and as we would willingly forget that any body had ever said before him . But this is a better selfishness , it goes further towards benevolence ^ than that of the members of what are called superior classes . There is more of mind and heart in it . Our author has himself described
them in another part of the volume . He knows their worth . We only wished to remind him , that in present circumstances rather than in the annals of the past , were to be found the causes which have qualified them , not indeed for voters under our ' final * Reform Bill , but for the following independent and honourable eulogy :
ft It has been my good fortune to correspond with many of the operative class , not only as a member of Parliament , upon political affairs , but in my prouder capacity , as a literary man , upon various schemes , which , in letters and in science , had occurred to their ingenuity . I have not only corresponded with these men , but I have also mixed personally with others of their tribe , and I have found that an acuteness of observation was even less the distinction of their character , than a certain noble and disinterested humanity of disposition . Among such persons I would seek , without a lantern , for the true philanthropist . Deeply acquainted with the ills of their race , their main public thought is to alleviate and relieve them ; they have not the jealousy common to men who have risen a little above their kind ; they desire more " to raise the wretched than to rise ; " their plots and their schemings are not for themselves , but for their class . Their ambition is godlike , for it is the desire to enlighten and to bless . There is a divine and sacred species of ambition , which is but another word for benevolence . These are they who endeavour to establish Mechanics' Institutes and plans of national education ; who clamour against taxes upon knowledge ; who desire virtue to be the foundation of happiness . I know not , indeed , an order of unen , more than that of which I speak , interesting our higher sympathies ; nor one that addresses more forcibly our sadder emotions , than that wider claes which they desire to relieve .
4 The common characteristics of the operatives even amidst all the miseries and excesses frequent amongst them , is that of desires better than their condition . They all have the wish for knowledge . They go to the gin-shop , and yet there they discuss the elements of virtue Apprenticed to the austerest trials of life , they acquire a universal sympathy with oppression . " Their country is the world . " You see this tendency in all their political theories ; it is from the darkness of their distress that they send forth the loud shouts which terrify injustice . It is their voice which is heard the earliest and dies the latest
Untitled Article
592 Characteristics of English Aristocracy *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1833, page 592, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2622/page/8/
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