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Updated: June 21, 2025
The conversion of the occupants of the land into full proprietors was intended to give greater stability and security to the peasant ownership of land, but the result was to improve the position of the moneylender, who, owing to the thriftlessness of the Indian rayat and the extravagant expenditure to which he is from time to time driven by traditional custom in regard to marriages, funerals, and other family ceremonies, has always played a disastrously important part in village life.
They have no direct personal motive for exercising prudence and economy, and they have no experience of the evils that result from thriftlessness and prodigality. It is much better for all children that they should have pecuniary responsibilities, such as are suited to their years, thrown upon them in their youth, when the mistakes they make in acquiring their experience are of little moment.
We are likely to over emphasize the moral and mental lacks shown in bad personal habits, such as drunkenness and licentiousness, in thriftlessness, laziness, or inefficiency; and some of us are even rash enough to attribute all the ills of the poor to drink or laziness.
Ignorance and the vices that accompany ignorance want of thoroughness, unpunctuality, thriftlessness, and improvidence are all in the count against the lowest order of worker; but the better class, and indeed the large proportion of the lower, are living honest, self-respecting, infinitely dreary lives.
We have not the slightest sympathy with that socialistic idea which would try to put laziness, thriftlessness and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift and efficiency; which would strive to break up not merely private property, but what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilization stands.
Then, cookery for the poor. Here Mr. Jones fell inadvertently into a trap. He said that the chief want amongst the poor was something to cook: there was very little spending in twelve shillings a week, or even in fifteen and eighteen, with a family to house, clothe, and feed. Lady Angleby held a quite opposite view. She said that a helpless thriftlessness was at the root of the matter.
In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself. From the beginning there had been between them the barrier of circumstance. Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose thriftlessness had become a proverb.
One word more: ill-kept, ofttimes squalid as is the house of the French peasant owner, he can say with Touchstone, 'Tis a poor thing, but 'tis my own. The son of the soil in France may want carpets, wardrobes, clean swept hearths: he at least owns a home from which only imprudence or thriftlessness can eject him.
I shall no doubt be told that what I have just written has an immoral tendency, and is a direct encouragement to sloth, thriftlessness, etc. I will not be guilty of that fault. I do like to look a fact in the face without blinking. I am fully persuaded that, per head, there is more of the virtues in the unsuccessful majority than in the successful minority.
Less than an acre, fenced in the rudest manner, enclosed the "farm and farm buildings," the latter consisting of a small log house and log pigsty, the cabin, at the time our sketch opens, being, it is evident, at least two seasons old a fact which serves to show the more plainly the poverty and thriftlessness of the inmates; for they have had time, certainly, to cultivate quite a tract of the easily-tilled land, had they enterprise and industry.
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