Barney
will be poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them go
where they will, and wreck all the governments under heaven, they
will be poor until they die.
Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing. It has to me been always something of a relief to find the
poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in
consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better
grace. The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his
childhood up. He excused himself for his defective education on the
ground that he had been overworked from first to last. Even now, he
said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a book. In
consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was occupied for four
or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of the twenty-four,
and then principally in walking; and the remainder of the day he
passed in born idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his
back against a door.
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