"The remedy is education. Educate the working men and women, and you have a remedy for the crying evil of the country. Give the people mental food, and they will not thirst after the abominable drink which is poisoning them."
He had hitherto been doing something to assist the temperance cause by the sale of tea and coffee, and he now turned his attention to the issue of publications calculated to benefit the cause.
Having, at the age of twenty-four, married Mary Abbott, he became possessed of additional means for carrying out his publishing schemes.
Cheap illustrated periodicals began to issue from the press under his superintendence, and copies were multiplied by the hundred thousand.
He never forgot that he had been a working man, and one of the first publications he started was called The Working Man's Friend.
It is not necessary to say more. Though John Cassell died comparatively young—he was only forty-eight when his death took place in 1865—he had done a grand life's work; and the soundness of his judgment is shown by the fact that works which he planned retain their hold upon the people to this day.
John Cassell had his ambitions, but they were of a very simple kind.
"I started in life with one ambition," he said, "and that was to have a clean shirt every day of my life; this I have accomplished now for some years; but I have a second ambition, and that is to be an MAP., and represent the people's cause; then I shall be public property, and you may do what you like with me." This latter desire he would doubtless have realised but for his early decease.