just after Newman's return from his Swiss tour, goes on with the same
subject as the last, and also touches on the evils of _suddenly_
introducing machinery; while it shows clearly that, in the long run,
better wages are gained for the worker by its means--"Machinery is in
every light the friend of the poor." He says very truly, "The first great
want of the workmen is better morality and more thriftiness, _not_ better
masters or higher wages." Putting quite aside the question of whether
"higher wages" are not needed by the workman, nothing can be truer at the
present time than this fact, brought thus before us by Newman. It _is_,
beyond all question, these faults which run through the bulk of the
labouring classes (as we term them)--lack of the true spirit of morality
and thriftiness.

It is difficult altogether to account for the reason why the lack of these
characteristics is so much to the fore to-day, or to think of the remedy
which shall reach and cure them. But that it is a presence in our midst is
a self-evident fact. No one who has travelled much in France (to name only
one other country), but is aware how vast is the gulf which divides the
ways of living of our own labouring classes and of those which obtain
across the water. There, thriftiness is the rule. They use a far simpler
diet, and one which the land supplies them with, and are content. There is
a far more healthy tone about them, even if it be a rough one, than there
is among our own poor. I am constantly in France myself (it is the country
of my own ancestors), and I have never failed to be struck by the absence
there, in the country, of the vice which disfigures so often the home life
of our villagers. You do not see there the sights that make the streets on
Saturday evening in England a degrading scene. When the French villager is
happy, he can be it without the aid of drunkenness. And as far as the
cultivation of the land is concerned--well, we need only look at home in
our "French Farming" schemes to-day and we shall find that when we want to