Supposing, reader, that whether you are manufacturer, master-workman, owner of land, or private individual, you are now thoroughly impressed with the duty of attending to the welfare of your dependants; I proceed to make some general reflections which may aid you in your outset, or sustain you in the progress, of your endeavours.
And, first, let me implore you not to delay that outset. Make a beginning at once, at least in investigating the matters to which I have striven to draw your attention. It is no curious work of art that you have to take up; it requires no nicety of apprehension; you can hardly begin wrongly, I do not say in action, but in the preparation for action. However little of each day you may be able to call your own for this purpose, it is better to begin with that little than to wait for some signal time of leisure. Routine encumbers us; our days are frittered away by most minute employments that we cannot control; and, when spare moments do occur, we are mostly unprepared with any pursuits of our own to go on with. Hence it is, that the most obvious evils go on, generation after generation, people not having time, as they would say, to interfere. Men are for ever putting off the concerns which should be dearest to them to a “more convenient season,” when, as they hope, there may be fewer trifles to distract their attention: but a great work, which is to commence in the heart, requires not to have the first stone laid for it, with pomp, upon some holiday. It. is good to have made a beginning upon it at any time.
The wisdom, or the folly, of delay is in most instances like that of a traveller coming to a stream, and wishing to ford it, yet continuing his journey along its banks: and whether this is wise, or not, depends mainly on the simple fact, of whether he is walking up to the source, or down to the fall. The latter is apt to be the direction in the case of our generous resolves: their difficulty widens as I we delay to act upon them.
Throughout the progress of your work, there is nothing that you will have more frequently to be mindful of than your views with respect to self-advancement. To take one form of it, the acquisition of money. Money, as Charles Lamb, a great despiser of cant, observed, is not dross, but books, pictures, wines, and many pleasant things. Still I suspect that money is more sought after to gratify vanity, than to possess the means of enjoying any of the above named pleasant things. Money is so much desired, because it is a measure of success; so much regretted, because we fancy the loss of it leaves us powerless and contemptible. That kind of satire, therefore, which delights to dwell upon the general subserviency to wealth is not likely to make men less desirous of riches. But a man would be likely to estimate more reasonably the possession of money and of all kinds of self-advancement, if he did but perceive, that even a man’s worldly success is not to be measured by his success for himself alone, but by the result of his endeavours for the great family of man.