United States or Japan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Traits of that kind show us the genuine man, the brother of us all, brought visible through twelve centuries, the veritable Son of our common Mother. Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant. He is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is not.
The population is frugal, honest, self-helping, and in many respects resembles that of Switzerland. The system of inland communication by means of the Gotha Canal is one of the most remarkable ever achieved by man, when the obstacles which have been overcome and the advantages accomplished are considered.
Those violent little commonwealths had blood in their veins. They were compact of proud, self-helping, muscular vigor. The most sanguinary tumults which they ever enacted in the face of day, were better than the order and silence born of the midnight darkness of despotism. That very unruliness was educating the people for their future work.
It is for this reason that I have thought it necessary to reveal, as minutely as possible, the secret details of this conspiracy of king and priest against the people, and to show how it was baffled at last by the strong self-helping energy of two free nations combined.
Holland and England, self-helping, self-moving, were already inaugurating a new era in the history of the world. The spirit of commercial maritime enterprise then expanding rapidly into large proportions was to be matched against the religious and knightly enthusiasm which had accomplished such wonders in an age that was passing away.
We come to them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.
The speculation had been a fortunate one both, for himself and for the kingdom. The terrible Sea-King was one of the great types of the sixteenth century. The self-helping private adventurer, in his little vessel the 'Golden Hind, one hundred tons burthen, had waged successful war against a mighty empire, and had shown England how to humble Philip.
He is a shrewder, more active, more self-helping man; give him but the chances of maintaining the same physical strength and health as the countryman, and he will support the honour of the British arms as gallantly as the Highlander or the Connaughtman, and restore the days when the invincible prentice-boys of London carried terror into the heart of foreign lands.
He may be honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting, and self-helping that is, be a true gentleman. The poor man with a rich spirit is in all ways superior to the rich man with a poor spirit. To borrow S. Paul's words, the former is as "having nothing, yet possessing all things," while the other, though possessing all things, has nothing.
With the French, who are essentially a Southern people, the double education of despotism and Catholicism has, in spite of their impulsive temperament, made submission and endurance the common character of the people, and their most received notion of wisdom and excellence; and if envy of one another, and of all superiority, is not more rife among them than it is, the circumstance must be ascribed to the many valuable counteracting elements in the French character, and most of all to the great individual energy which, though less persistent and more intermittent than in the self-helping and struggling Anglo-Saxons, has nevertheless manifested itself among the French in nearly every direction in which the operation of their institutions has been favorable to it.
Word Of The Day