Self Help - Samuel Smiles (children's ebooks free online TXT) 📗
- Author: Samuel Smiles
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that the help which we derive from others in the journey of life is
of very great importance. The poet Wordsworth has well said that
“these two things, contradictory though they may seem, must go
together—manly dependence and manly independence, manly reliance
and manly self-reliance.” From infancy to old age, all are more or
less indebted to others for nurture and culture; and the best and
strongest are usually found the readiest to acknowledge such help.
Take, for example, the career of the late Alexis de Tocqueville, a
man doubly well-born, for his father was a distinguished peer of
France, and his mother a grand-daughter of Malesherbes. Through
powerful family influence, he was appointed Judge Auditor at
Versailles when only twenty-one; but probably feeling that he had
not fairly won the position by merit, he determined to give it up
and owe his future advancement in life to himself alone. “A
foolish resolution,” some will say; but De Tocqueville bravely
acted it out. He resigned his appointment, and made arrangements
to leave France for the purpose of travelling through the United
States, the results of which were published in his great book on
‘Democracy in America.’ His friend and travelling companion,
Gustave de Beaumont, has described his indefatigable industry
during this journey. “His nature,” he says, “was wholly averse to
idleness, and whether he was travelling or resting, his mind was
always at work… . With Alexis, the most agreeable conversation
was that which was the most useful. The worst day was the lost
day, or the day ill spent; the least loss of time annoyed him.”
Tocqueville himself wrote to a friend—“There is no time of life at
which one can wholly cease from action, for effort without one’s
self, and still more effort within, is equally necessary, if not
more so, when we grow old, as it is in youth. I compare man in
this world to a traveller journeying without ceasing towards a
colder and colder region; the higher he goes, the faster he ought
to walk. The great malady of the soul is cold. And in resisting
this formidable evil, one needs not only to be sustained by the
action of a mind employed, but also by contact with one’s fellows
in the business of life.” {3}
Notwithstanding de Tocqueville’s decided views as to the necessity
of exercising individual energy and self-dependence, no one could
be more ready than he was to recognise the value of that help and
support for which all men are indebted to others in a greater or
less degree. Thus, he often acknowledged, with gratitude, his
obligations to his friends De Kergorlay and Stofells,—to the
former for intellectual assistance, and to the latter for moral
support and sympathy. To De Kergorlay he wrote—“Thine is the only
soul in which I have confidence, and whose influence exercises a
genuine effect upon my own. Many others have influence upon the
details of my actions, but no one has so much influence as thou on
the origination of fundamental ideas, and of those principles which
are the rule of conduct.” De Tocqueville was not less ready to
confess the great obligations which he owed to his wife, Marie, for
the preservation of that temper and frame of mind which enabled him
to prosecute his studies with success. He believed that a noble-minded woman insensibly elevated the character of her husband,
while one of a grovelling nature as certainly tended to degrade it.
{4}
In fine, human character is moulded by a thousand subtle
influences; by example and precept; by life and literature; by
friends and neighbours; by the world we live in as well as by the
spirits of our forefathers, whose legacy of good words and deeds we
inherit. But great, unquestionably, though these influences are
acknowledged to be, it is nevertheless equally clear that men must
necessarily be the active agents of their own well-being and well-doing; and that, however much the wise and the good may owe to
others, they themselves must in the very nature of things be their
own best helpers.
“Le travail et la Science sont desormais les maitres du monde.”—De
Salvandy.
“Deduct all that men of the humbler classes have done for England
in the way of inventions only, and see where she would have been
but for them.”—Arthur Helps.
One of the most strongly-marked features of the English people is
their spirit of industry, standing out prominent and distinct in
their past history, and as strikingly characteristic of them now as
at any former period. It is this spirit, displayed by the commons
of England, which has laid the foundations and built up the
industrial greatness of the empire. This vigorous growth of the
nation has been mainly the result of the free energy of
individuals, and it has been contingent upon the number of hands
and minds from time to time actively employed within it, whether as
cultivators of the soil, producers of articles of utility,
contrivers of tools and machines, writers of books, or creators of
works of art. And while this spirit of active industry has been
the vital principle of the nation, it has also been its saving and
remedial one, counteracting from time to time the effects of errors
in our laws and imperfections in our constitution.
The career of industry which the nation has pursued, has also
proved its best education. As steady application to work is the
healthiest training for every individual, so is it the best
discipline of a state. Honourable industry travels the same road
with duty; and Providence has closely linked both with happiness.
The gods, says the poet, have placed labour and toil on the way
leading to the Elysian fields. Certain it is that no bread eaten
by man is so sweet as that earned by his own labour, whether bodily
or mental. By labour the earth has been subdued, and man redeemed
from barbarism; nor has a single step in civilization been made
without it. Labour is not only a necessity and a duty, but a
blessing: only the idler feels it to be a curse. The duty of work
is written on the thews and muscles of the limbs, the mechanism of
the hand, the nerves and lobes of the brain—the sum of whose
healthy action is satisfaction and enjoyment. In the school of
labour is taught the best practical wisdom; nor is a life of manual
employment, as we shall hereafter find, incompatible with high
mental culture.
Hugh Miller, than whom none knew better the strength and the
weakness belonging to the lot of labour, stated the result of his
experience to be, that Work, even the hardest, is full of pleasure
and materials for self-improvement. He held honest labour to be
the best of teachers, and that the school of toil is the noblest of
schools—save only the Christian one,—that it is a school in which
the ability of being useful is imparted, the spirit of independence
learnt, and the habit of persevering effort acquired. He was even
of opinion that the training of the mechanic,—by the exercise
which it gives to his observant faculties, from his daily dealing
with things actual and practical, and the close experience of life
which he acquires,—better fits him for picking his way along the
journey of life, and is more favourable to his growth as a Man,
emphatically speaking, than the training afforded by any other
condition.
The array of great names which we have already cursorily cited, of
men springing from the ranks of the industrial classes, who have
achieved distinction in various walks of life—in science,
commerce, literature, and art—shows that at all events the
difficulties interposed by poverty and labour are not
insurmountable. As respects the great contrivances and inventions
which have conferred so much power and wealth upon the nation, it
is unquestionable that for the greater part of them we have been
indebted to men of the humblest rank. Deduct what they have done
in this particular line of action, and it will be found that very
little indeed remains for other men to have accomplished.
Inventors have set in motion some of the greatest industries of the
world. To them society owes many of its chief necessaries,
comforts, and luxuries; and by their genius and labour daily life
has been rendered in all respects more easy as well as enjoyable.
Our food, our clothing, the furniture of our homes, the glass which
admits the light to our dwellings at the same time that it excludes
the cold, the gas which illuminates our streets, our means of
locomotion by land and by sea, the tools by which our various
articles of necessity and luxury are fabricated, have been the
result of the labour and ingenuity of many men and many minds.
Mankind at large are all the happier for such inventions, and are
every day reaping the benefit of them in an increase of individual
well-being as well as of public enjoyment.
Though the invention of the working steam-engine—the king of
machines—belongs, comparatively speaking, to our own epoch, the
idea of it was born many centuries ago. Like other contrivances
and discoveries, it was effected step by step—one man transmitting
the result of his labours, at the time apparently useless, to his
successors, who took it up and carried it forward another stage,—
the prosecution of the inquiry extending over many generations.
Thus the idea promulgated by Hero of Alexandria was never
altogether lost; but, like the grain of wheat hid in the hand of
the Egyptian mummy, it sprouted and again grew vigorously when
brought into the full light of modern science. The steam-engine
was nothing, however, until it emerged from the state of theory,
and was taken in hand by practical mechanics; and what a noble
story of patient, laborious investigation, of difficulties
encountered and overcome by heroic industry, does not that
marvellous machine tell of! It is indeed, in itself, a monument of
the power of self-help in man. Grouped around it we find Savary,
the military engineer; Newcomen, the Dartmouth blacksmith; Cawley,
the glazier; Potter, the engine-boy; Smeaton, the civil engineer;
and, towering above all, the laborious, patient, never-tiring James
Watt, the mathematical-instrument maker.
Watt was one of the most industrious of men; and the story of his
life proves, what all experience confirms, that it is not the man
of the greatest natural vigour and capacity who achieves the
highest results, but he who employs his powers with the greatest
industry and the most carefully disciplined skill—the skill that
comes by labour, application, and experience. Many men in his time
knew far more than Watt, but none laboured so assiduously as he did
to turn all that he did know to useful practical purposes. He was,
above all things, most persevering in the pursuit of facts. He
cultivated carefully that habit of active attention on which all
the higher working qualities of the mind mainly depend. Indeed,
Mr. Edgeworth entertained the opinion, that the difference of
intellect in men depends more upon the early cultivation of this
HABIT OF ATTENTION, than upon any great disparity between the
powers of one individual and another.
Even when a boy, Watt found science in his toys. The quadrants
lying about his father’s carpenter’s shop led him to the study of
optics and astronomy; his ill health induced him to pry into the
secrets of physiology; and his solitary walks through the country
attracted him to the study of botany and history. While carrying
on the business of a mathematical-instrument maker, he received an
order to build an organ; and, though without an ear for music, he
undertook the study of harmonics, and successfully constructed the
instrument. And, in like manner, when the little model of
Newcomen’s steam-engine, belonging to the University of Glasgow,
was
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