Dr. Samuel Smiles published a book on Self-Help in 1859. In 1857, two years earlier, I had used the same title "Self-Help by the People." In a later work, "Self-Help, a Hundred Years Ago," the title was continued. I had introduced it into Co-operation, where it became a watchword. I have wondered whether Dr. Smiles borrowed the name from me. He knew me in 1841, when he was editing the Leeds _Times_ to which I was a contributor. He must have seen in Mill's "Principles of Political Economy," "Self-Help by the People--History of Co-operation in Rochdale," quoted in Mill's book (book iv. chap. viii.).
The phrase "Science is the Providence of Life" was an expression I had used in drawing up a statement of Secular Principles twenty-four years before I found it in the poem of Akenside's.
Two things of the past I may name as they indicate the age of opinions, by many supposed to be recent. Co-operators are considered as intending the abolition of competition, but as what we call nature--human, animal, and insect--is founded upon competition, nobody has the means of abolishing it. In the first number of the _Reasoner_, June 3, 1846, in the first article, I stated that Mr. Owen and his friends proclaimed co-operation as the "Corrector of the excesses of competition in social life"--a much more modest undertaking than superseding it.
The second thing I name that I wrote in the same number of the _Reasoner_ is a short paper on "Moral Mathematics," setting forth that there is a mathematics of morality as well as of lines and angles. There are problems in morality, the right solution of which contributes as much to mental discipline as any to be found in Euclid. These I thus set forth--
Problem 1. Given--an angry man to answer without being angry yourself.
Problem 2. Given--an opponent full of bitterness and unjust insinuations to reply to without asperity or stooping to counter insinuations.
Problem 3. Given--your own favourite truths to state without dogmatism, and to praise without pride, adducing with fairness the objections to them without disparaging the judgment of those who hold the objections.
Problem 4. Given--an inconsistent and abusive opponent. It is required to reply to him by argument, convincing rather than retorting. All opportunities of "thrashing" him are to be passed by, all pain to be saved him as far as possible, and no word set down whose object is not the opponent's improvement.