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Untitled Article
volumes of evidence published by the Diffusion Society at a cheap rate , would be very interesting , and contain much Useful Know ^ . ledge for all who are out of the way of seeing for themselves what is doing amongst the most formidable part of our population . The present mental condition of a large body of the mechanics of
England is no joke . Their intelligence , their principles , their growing moral power , are indications of approaching change , not merely in political forms , but in the structure of society , which it is high time to study , and on which a philosophical and courageous statesman , if such an one the country were but blessed withal , would already begin to act , and that on no petty scale . Happily this growing power is not one of brute force ; it is a developement
of intelligence . To us , therefore , there is in it nothing fearful . The only evil which we apprehend is in the kind of resistance which may be opposed to it . It may be guided , but it cannot be coerced : and the attempt to mislead it , for the private benefit of other classes , will not fail less signally , nor recoil less destructively , than even coercion itself . We have long been impressed by the conviction that the intellect of poverty must be self-instructed ; that it will not feed on the crumbs which fall from the rich man ' s
table ; that the real teachers of the poorer class must themselves be men of that class , imbued with its peculiar feelings , alive to its peculiar interests , influenced even by its peculiar prejudices ; but by their native power of mind , strongly conscious of its peculiar wants , and of capacity to minister to the supply of those wants . Such are the teachers who will be attended to without suspicion ;
whose words will have many echoes from the multitudes of their brethren , while the voice of condescending instruction dies without response on the empty air . Laqghable as it might lately have been deemed , the ' producing men' are actually producing their own politicians and poets ; and such too as feel it to be a grander
and a nobler part , to make common cause with their brethren , raising their minds and refining their tastes , than to become , as was the old practice , the flattered appendages of superior station , tame monsters , with the range of the kitchen , rising into the livery dignity of patronage , hot-pressed paper , and a subscription list .
We know not by what pope Saint Monday was put into the calendar . We have often heard of his existence , and of a heathen sort of worship performed to his honour and glory . He used to be a kind of hebdomadal St . Swithin ; only the showers were of stronger stuff and of shorter continuance . But this is the first
hymn in his praise that we have ever seen . If all it says of him be true , he is not less a martyr than a saint . The poem describes as much of suffering and privation , as it does of that recklessness and jollity on account of which St . Monday was canonized . In * deed , this is , to our taste , by far the least pleasing portion of the composition . We could very well have spared the factory break-
Untitled Article
830 Saint Monday .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1833, page 830, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2628/page/26/
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