* See "Last Trial for Atheism."
In 1895 (as I had always intended), I had a brass tablet cast bearing the simple inscription—
"Near this spot was buried
MADELINE,
Daughter of George Jacob and Eleanor Holyoake,
WHO PERISHED
October! 1842."
This tablet I had placed on the wall over the grave where the poor child lay. The grave is close to the wall. The cemetery authorities had objections to the word "Perished." When I explained to them the circumstances of Madeline's death, they permitted its erection, on my paying a cemetery fee of two guineas. The tablet will endure as long as the cemetery wall lasts. The tablet is on the left side of the main entrance to the cemetery, somewhat obscured by trees now.
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.