parrots of society are not more pernicious to its interests than
its birds of prey. I should be glad to hear such people’s estimate
of the comparative danger of “a little learning” and a vast amount
of ignorance; I should be glad to know which they consider the most
prolific parent of misery and crime. Descending a little lower in
the social scale, I should be glad to assist them in their
calculations, by carrying them into certain gaols and nightly
refuges I know of, where my own heart dies within me, when I see
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thousands of immortal creatures condemned, without alternative or
choice, to tread, not what our great poet calls the “primrose path”
to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jaded flints and stones,
laid down by brutal ignorance, and held together, like the solid
rocks, by years of this most wicked axiom.
Would we know from any honourable body of merchants, upright in
deed and thought, whether they would rather have ignorant or
enlightened persons in their own employment? Why, we have had
their answer in this building; we have it in this company; we have
it emphatically given in the munificent generosity of your own
merchants of Manchester, of all sects and kinds, when this
establishment was first proposed. But are the advantages derivable
by the people from institutions such as this, only of a negative
character? If a little learning be an innocent thing, has it no
distinct, wholesome, and immediate influence upon the mind? The
old doggerel rhyme, so often written in the beginning of books,
says that
“When house and lands are gone and spent,
Then learning is most excellent;”
but I should be strongly disposed to reform the adage, and say that
“Though house and lands be never got,
Learning can give what they canNOT.”
And this I know, that the first unpurchasable blessing earned by
every man who makes an effort to improve himself in such a place as
the Athenaeum, is self-respect – an inward dignity of character,
which, once acquired and righteously maintained, nothing – no, not
the hardest drudgery, nor the direst poverty – can vanquish.
Though he should find it hard for a season even to keep the wolf –
hunger – from his door, let him but once have chased the dragon –
ignorance – from his hearth, and self-respect and hope are left
him. You could no more deprive him of those sustaining qualities
by loss or destruction of his worldly goods, than you could, by
plucking out his eyes, take from him an internal consciousness of
the bright glory of the sun.
The man who lives from day to day by the daily exercise in his
sphere of hands or head, and seeks to improve himself in such a
place as the Athenaeum, acquires for himself that property of soul
which has in all times upheld struggling men of every degree, but
self-made men especially and always. He secures to himself that
faithful companion which, while it has ever lent the light of its
countenance to men of rank and eminence who have deserved it, has
ever shed its brightest consolations on men of low estate and
almost hopeless means. It took its patient seat beside Sir Walter
Raleigh in his dungeon-study in the Tower; it laid its head upon
the block with More; but it did not disdain to watch the stars with
Ferguson, the shepherd’s boy; it walked the streets in mean attire
with Crabbe; it was a poor barber here in Lancashire with
Arkwright; it was a tallow-chandler’s son with Franklin; it worked
at shoemaking with Bloomfield in his garret; it followed the plough
with Burns; and, high above the noise of loom and hammer, it
whispers courage even at this day in ears I could name in Sheffield
and in Manchester.
The more the man who improves his leisure in such a place learns,
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the better, gentler, kinder man he must become. When he knows how
much great minds have suffered for the truth in every age and time,
and to what dismal persecutions opinion has been exposed, he will