“The very common plan of working very hard during the best years of your life, in order that you may heap up security for future comfort, is, I think we are all agreed, a very mistaken one. It is much wiser to be satisfied with a less amount of security, and enjoy your ease while your spirits and health remain unimpaired, and before your habits are so far fixed as to render any change undesirable. Still there is an amount of security which is necessary to prevent care and anxiety; but that necessary amount will, of course, be proportionate to the scale of living you may adopt.
“To me it appears to be of very little consequence whether we are consistent or not, but it is very important to be right.
“If we have been right hitherto, we should make no change because we have been right; if we have been wrong, it would be unwise to continue so for the sake of being consistent. I know that right and wrong are here comparative; and that it may be wise to continue in a path which you have already trodden, though it may not be the most direct, or the least rugged, rather than encounter the hedges and ditches which may lie between you and the straight and even road. But if you can satisfy yourself that the advantages of the direct road will, in all probability, more than balance the labour and risk of getting into it, you would be foolish not to make the change. I am not begging the question by assuming that the proposed course is the best; I only wish to show on what grounds the propriety of a change ought to be discussed.
“Though I disregard a character for consistency, which is a virtue or a vice according to circumstances (which is it in Lord Eldon?) yet I am desirous to show that I have not made so many mistakes, nor so decidedly changed my views as you imagine. I conceive that we have been already remunerated for the additional outlay in building at Hazelwood. With the views I now advocate, the propriety of purchasing Bruce Castle may be questioned; but I do not see that the step was manifestly improper. The buildings and grounds would, in all probability, sell for more than they cost us.... My views have certainly changed inasmuch as I am now inclined to abandon the hope of establishing the College, or collection of schools of which I used to talk; but the change has been caused by circumstances as unexpected by others as they were by myself. I allude to the great reduction in numbers at Hazelwood, and to the present prospects there and here (we expect barely to maintain our late number), showing, I fear, diminished confidence in the public—to the vexations arising from the fact of our being obliged to teach so much which we consider as nearly useless, and, in some cases, very mischievous—from the unreasonable expectations of the friends of our pupils, and from the still-continuing caprices of the parents, as manifested constantly by the removal of boys with whom we have been most successful.... I think too that we are all wearing ourselves out very fast, and that the time is not very far distant when some of us will be obliged to stop, without perhaps health and spirits sufficient to enjoy any mode of living. As to my anxiety to do good, it is as strong now as ever, and I think that the proposed change, by allowing us to educate our children for a better state of society, will enable us through their means to do good much more effectually, and even speedily, than we could on any other plan.... As regards myself, even if you were all the warmest advocates of the plan, it is very possible that I might never share its advantages. I have not as yet said anything to my wife on the subject. It is true that she often talks of retirement as a desirable thing, but even if she should be inclined to join in this very economical plan of retirement, I think the persuasions of her friends would very likely influence her against it, and without her consent I shall not join in it myself.”
Rowland Hill was, indeed, a man, to use Gibbon’s words, “whom nature had designed to think as he pleased, and to speak as he thought.” Such freedom as this is only enjoyed in its fullest extent by those who have secured “independence, that first earthly blessing.” But independence, if it is chiefly enjoyed by men of ample means, is, nevertheless, within the reach of those who have but simple wants. Yet after all there was not a little truth in what their old father wrote on hearing of this scheme of his sons: “My dear son Rowland. You and your brothers are the last men to make monks of.”
Such a scheme as this has a strong outward resemblance to the Pantisocracy of Southey and Coleridge; but the differences between the two schemes are far greater than the resemblances. The two poets were as young as they were unversed in the ways of the world, when the delightful prospect of happiness opened before their view to live with their friends in the most agreeable and most honourable employment, to eat the fruits they had raised, and see every face happy around them.[79] The band of friends whom they had gathered round them were, perhaps, not more experienced than themselves. But the planners of the other scheme were men who had spent many years in hard work, and in habits of strict economy. They did not, like the two poets, look upon money as a huge evil with which, happily, they should not long have to contend. They had learnt its value. They knew how to buy and how to sell. They had a certain amount of capital at their command. Two of them, moreover, were skilful in the use of tools, and fertile in mechanical inventions. They had long tried in their family union the plan of a Social Community, and were entering upon their undertaking with a clear insight into the difficulties which awaited them. They were fully alive, moreover, to the dangers that Owen had brought upon himself by his indiscriminate admission of all comers. They only proposed to invite men to join them with whose characters they had first become thoroughly acquainted. In a list of “members apparently qualified,” I find the names of Dr. Southwood Smith and Mr. Roebuck. “I formed an intimate acquaintance with Mr. Roebuck,” Sir Rowland Hill has recorded, “about the year 1830. In 1832 (I think) my wife nursed him through a long illness at Bruce Castle.” Their Social Community was not so much an end in itself as a means towards other and far higher ends. They had schemes for moving the earth; but they wanted a fulcrum. They had no leisure. What Rowland Hill could do when he was free from his school, he showed in the next four years of his life. In the spare time that a man could command who was Secretary to a new and active Commission, he invented, as will be seen, a printing-press, and devised his great scheme of Postal Reform. In like manner his youngest surviving brother, who, a year or two after the Social Community was planned, was made the First Inspector of Prisons in Scotland, had in no long time thoroughly reformed them, and made them a model for the whole kingdom.
No steps were taken to carry through their scheme. It had scarcely been completed on paper before Rowland Hill obtained, what he had long wanted, “a work of organisation.” Within no long time all the other brothers were happily engaged in occupations that suited their powers and their tastes. “When I was a young man,” said Sir Rowland Hill one day to me, “there were very few careers open. I never even dreamed of the possibility of getting into the Civil Service.” A new career, however, was at length opening for him, and the long, though broken, course of his public services was on the point of beginning. To this point I have traced his life, and here I shall bring the first part of my task to an end. His history for the next thirty years will be given in his own narrative. I shall take up my pen again at the date of his retirement, and do my best to describe the closing years of his long and honourable life. My task will be no easy one, for
“The eyes of men,
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,