"Do you see those two boys walking together?" he said to an assistant master. "I never saw them together before; you should make an especial point of observing the company they keep; nothing so tells the changes in a boy's character."
He deprecated such long terms for boys or masters as twenty-one weeks, and wished for more "co-operation in our system of public education, including both the great schools and the universities."
Besides his teaching, Arnold did much writing of pamphlets and books. "I must write or die," was an expression which he often used. His pamphlet on "The Christian Duty of Conceding the Roman Catholic Claims," in 1828, whereby many of their civil and political disabilities were to be removed, created great bitterness of feeling against him. Sir Robert Peel, the leader of the House of Commons, was also fighting the battles for the Roman Catholics of Ireland, and probably saved England from a civil war by his advocacy. But toleration was as rare nearly a century ago as it is to-day, and Arnold soon received abuse from pulpit and pew.
He was the devoted friend of the poor and the laborers. In 1831 Arnold started the Englishmen's Register, a weekly newspaper, with the hope of telling the people "the evils that exist, and lead them, if I can, to their causes and their remedies."
"If the clergy would come forward," he writes to his beloved sister Susannah, "as one man, from Cumberland to Cornwall, exhorting peaceableness on the one side and justice on the other, denouncing the high rents and the game laws, and the carelessness which keeps the poor ignorant, and then wonders that they are brutal, I verily believe they might yet save themselves and the State." ...
To the Rev. Augustus Hare, he writes; "Unquestionably our aristocratic manners and habits have made us and the poor two distinct and unsympathizing bodies; and from want of sympathy I fear the transition to enmity is but too easy when distress embitters the feelings, and the sight of others in luxury makes that distress still more intolerable. This is the plague-spot, to my mind, in our whole state of society, which must be removed, or the whole must perish."
He rejoiced that some of the leading manufacturers "are considering that their workmen have something else besides hands belonging to them, and are beginning to attend to the welfare of that something."
The Register soon died, because Arnold could not give all the time needed to conduct it, or the large amount of money necessary to start and carry on a weekly paper. His articles, however, about laborers were copied into the Sheffield Courant, and he was asked to continue his writings for its columns.
He was always a noble friend to the poor. At Laleham and Rugby he gave lectures in their interest, and was often seen in their homes. "I never knew such an humble man as the doctor," said the parish clerk at Laleham; "he comes and shakes us by the hand as if he was one of us." At his later home in Westmoreland a poor woman said, "He used to come into my house and talk to me as if I was a lady."