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Updated: May 1, 2025
No doubt we could, if necessary, carry on for a time without the press; and I agree with those newspaper writers who have been saying recently that the importance of the press is monstrously exaggerated by some of its critics. The working-man, so far as I know him, does not depend for his patriotism on the leader-writers of the newspapers. He takes even the news with a very large grain of salt.
To spend his last breath, were it called for, in the attempt to succour the working-man against his capitalist oppressors, would have seemed to him the merest matter of course. And his mental acuteness was quite equal to his enthusiasm, and far more evident. In his talk with Wharton, he for a long time avoided, as before, out of a certain inner disdain, the smallest touch of sentiment.
He said to himself that the swine had succeeded in poisoning even the living wells of the nation: the People had ceased to be "People yourselves!" as a working-man said to one of the would-be founders of the Theaters of the People. "I am as much of the middle-class as you."
And like the rest of the conditions under which he lives, his want of religious and other culture contributes to keep the working-man more unconstrained, freer from inherited stable tenets and cut-and-dried opinions, than the bourgeois who is saturated with the class prejudices poured into him from his earliest youth.
In England I warrant the professional men would outnumber all others; the aristocracy would come next, and the urban working-man would be swamped by the villagers. The nation of shopkeepers would be poorly represented, and artisans would be few in the land.
When, on the other hand, the working-man received in 1824 the right of free association, these combinations were very soon spread over all England and attained great power. In all branches of industry Trades Unions were formed with the outspoken intention of protecting the single working-man against the tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie.
He was cut out for an industrious working-man, one that would rise and thrive in his business by hard work and thrift; he was destined by nature to rear a large family and to shine in the ranks of excellent family men. He was moulded for the threshold, poor boy, neither for the revolutionary camp nor for the scaffold, and it was thwarted domestic instinct which led him to steal.
In the sixteenth century it proclaimed Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the Church; in the seventeenth century it passionately upheld the 'right divine of kings to govern wrong'; in the eighteenth and nineteenth it was the obsequious supporter of the squirearchy and plutocracy; and now it grovels before the working-man, and supports every scheme of plundering the minority.
Bright walking down New Street, just after delivering one of his grandest speeches, when a working-man, one of the real "horny-handed," stepped up to him and patted him on the back in the most familiar and approving manner. I will also just note one other little incident in connection with Mr. Bright and Birmingham and then I have done.
I don't suppose there is any human being on earth so independent as an able-bodied working-man. The record of the next three years only traces a slow, steady strengthening of my position. Not one of us had any set-back through sickness because I considered our health as so much capital and guarded it as carefully as a banker does his money.
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