This is an example of the manner in which every succeeding generation is brought up differently from that preceding it; but it is an extreme example, and one that, though very real in the individuals, can never suddenly take place on a national scale.
The difference between the general affluence of a nation, and the change of its manners during the life of a man, is by no means equal to the difference between a remote province and the capital of an empire; but, though the example is extreme, the same effect is produced, in the course of several generations upon a nation, that was occasioned by change of place in one individual family from father to son. {73}
When a change like this takes place in one family, (and there are numerous instances of it every day,) poverty comes on again, and the children fall back into the laborious class of society, probably in a degraded state; but as the evil is supplied by new people rising up, it is little felt on the nation; if, however, it occurs very generally, it must have a bad effect; and, indeed, the best thing that can happen for the
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{72} If the mother has been herself born in affluence, she generally has a sort of smothered contempt for the mean origin of her husband. She seldom is fully sensible of the merit by which he has raised himself, and consequently cannot be capable of appreciating the advantage of bringing up her boy in the same way; on the contrary, the habits of industry, which the father acquired at an early age, under the pressure of necessity, are generally secret objects of ridicule to the rest of the family. If, again, the woman has been of low origin in herself, and is become affluent, then matters are ten times worse. Then there is all the pride and vanity that ignorance, and a desire to hide that mean extraction create. Incapable of shewing delicacy and fine breeding in herself, she spoils her harmless children by converting them into specimens of the gentility of the family. For more of this, see the chapter on Education.
{73} In Rome, after the taking of Carthage; and in Portugal, immediately after it got possession of the trade to India; the change must have been as great over the whole of the people in one generation, as it is generally between a remote province and near the capital.
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general welfare is, that such men may return to a state of insignificance and labour as fast as possible; for, while they remain above that, and in a declining state, they are filling their place in society badly.
It is different where the change goes on through a whole country, then no one can supply the place, they are all going the same way, and at nearly the same rate; {74} the consequence will be, that this will not be the fall of a family, but the fall of a whole people; the motion will, indeed, be much more slow, but the moving body will be vastly greater, and the effect will be in proportion.