None admire the simple sturdy honesty of the working men of England more than ourselves; but to say that they like work better than pleasure, would be to chime in with the rhodomontade of the time, and make out that there is an especial delight in industry,—that is to say, in continuous labour; whereas this is precisely what is repulsive to human nature, and what all men are striving, and, indeed, paying large sums of money to avoid. If industry be such a supreme enjoyment, as the idle rich ever rejoice in declaring, then where is the virtue of it? where the merit of doing that which we have a natural bias to do? Let those who think work a pleasure try a week’s mental or manual labour, and then, feeling what a negative bliss there is in mere rest, get to know what it is to yearn, like a schoolboy, for a day’s leisure, ease, and amusement. It is well for fat and phlegmatic citizens to call people “lazy scoundrels,” and bid them “go and work;” but let these gentlemen themselves try their soft hands at labour, even for a day, and then they will feel how much easier, and, as the world goes, how much more profitable, it is to trade on others’ labour than to labour for oneself. No man, says the adage, makes a fortune by the work of his own hands. “Oh, sir!” replied the “valiant” Spanish beggar, when asked by the rich merchant why he did not go and work, “You don’t know how lazy I am.” The rich merchant was, of course, disgusted with the reply, but then he was not aware how lazy he himself naturally was. He was one of those who felt satisfied that industry is a special delight (though but rarely known to be industrious themselves), and who, consequently, believed that the honest poor always prefer labour to enjoyment, having, in the words of the Executive Committee, an habitual tendency to postpone pleasure for business. But the reason why the shilling folk absented themselves from the Great Exhibition at first was, because none of their own class had seen it, and they had not yet heard of its wonders, one from the other. But once seen, and once talked about in their workshops, their factories, and—it must be said—their taprooms, each gradually became curious to see what had astonished and delighted his fellows. They soon began to see that the Great Exhibition, rightly considered, is a huge academy for teaching the nobility of labour, and demonstrating the various triumphs of the useful arts over external nature.