[46] Nearly, but not quite. Injury is still done by false and mischievous teachers of working men; and the latter resent what they consider their wrongs and grievances in ways which are equally unjustifiable, if not exactly similar to those adopted by their fathers. Those who would do real service to the working classes are those who take up and expose the fallacies of living demagogues, by which the latter are misguided and led to injure themselves by strikes, combinations, and hostility to capital and machinery. And educational reformers will do the State good service in endeavouring to get lessons taught in political economy to those who will be at some future day our mechanics and artisans, and who from continued ignorance of the inevitable laws of supply and demand, of the value, even to them, of the security of property, of the laws which regulate the operations of the market, may possibly fall into the errors and the mistakes of their predecessors.
[47] Report of the Committee appointed by the Highland Society of Scotland to consider what is the best mode of forming institutions of the nature of Savings Banks, for receiving the deposits of labourers and others. Edinburgh, 1815.
[48] Nine-tenths of the existing Benefit Societies are still held at public houses. This arrangement must always be, so long as it exists, a theme for reprobation. There cannot be many greater anomalies than this of the association of the club and the cup, the bane and the antidote, saving and wasting. Speaking on this point, the Rev. J. B. Owen justly remarks that the strange association “together verify the old pagan fable of the tub of Danaus full of holes, whose daughters were condemned to be perpetually filling it, while all that was so laboriously poured in as wastefully and hopelessly ran out.” Or, as some one else has put it who has employed the same figure more strikingly:—
"Like Danaus' tub
Is the public house club:
Their customers' mouths are the holes;
Ill spared is the 'chink'
That's wasted in drink,
To the bane of their bodies and souls."
[49] See next page.
[50] Quarterly Review, vol. xxxii. p. 189.
[51] “Many a man in that year,” (1825), says Miss Martineau, “set up for a banker who would, at another time, have as soon thought of setting up for a king.”—History of the Thirty Years' Peace. Lord Liverpool complained afterwards of the system “which allowed any petty tradesman, any cobbler or cheesemonger, to usurp the royal prerogative, and issue money without check or control.”
[52] One prospectus of this date sets forth that, in the district proposed for a mine there was “a vein of tin ore at its bottom, as pure and as solid as a tin flagon.” Another, “Where lumps of pure gold, weighing from ten to fifty pounds, were lying totally neglected,” the quantity of gold in the mine “being considerably more than was necessary for the supply of the whole world.” Mr. Canning, in reference to the companies projected, said soon afterwards, “They fixed the public gaze, and excited the public avidity so as to cover us, in the eyes of foreign nations, if not with disgrace, at least with ridicule. They sprang up after the dawn of the morning, and had passed away before the dews of the evening descended. They came over the land like a cloud; they rose like bubbles of vapour towards the heavens, and destroyed by the puncture of a pin, they sank to the earth and were seen no more.”
[53] Annual Register, 1826.
[54] Progress of Savings Banks. A series of tabular views, 1829 to 1841, by Mr. J. Tidd Pratt. London. 1845.