It is time that we brought these introductory remarks to a close. We have to enter upon the consideration of helps and accessories to the spread of prudential habits among the working classes. We have to direct attention to the history and working of some of those schemes which, since the commencement of the present century, have been started to teach men self-reliance and self-dependence, and how they might best help themselves. Anxious not to over-estimate the importance of the subject, we still think it not too much to say that on our industrial classes depends very much the continued and onward progress of the world. Let them but be thoughtful and sober, and these classes, which are the direct agents in our wondrous and manifold British industry, will, not only under circumstances of huge toil and no inconsiderable danger, continue to provide all classes with the necessaries or comforts of life, but they will yet strike out new paths; they will become, in the future, as they have been in the past, the skilful inventors of new instruments and new modes. No fact is more capable of proof than that almost all the successful inventions that have been given to the world to economize the strength of the human hand have been either the productions of thoughtful and industrious workmen, or of those who have risen from that class. "Deduct all," says Mr. Helps, "that men of the humbler classes have done for England in the way of inventions only, and see where she would have been but for them." Nor is this all. The list would be a long one of those who have risen by their own industry and perseverance from the lowest ranks to fill the highest positions in every department of life. "It is notorious," says Mr. Smiles, "that many of our most successful employers, and some of our largest capitalists, have sprung directly from the working classes, and to use the ordinary phrase, have been 'the architects of their own fortunes;' whilst many more have risen from a rank scarcely a degree above them. It was the prudent thrift and careful accumulations of working-men that laid the foundations of the vast capital of the middle class; and it is this capital, combined with the skilled and energetic industry of all ranks, which renders England, in the quantity and quality of her work, superior to any other nation in the world."[9] And what the humbler classes have done for England in past times they may do, and indeed _must_ do in the future, if we would keep our country in the proud position she now occupies in the world. It requires no prophetic vision to foresee that labour must yet undergo many transformations; and it is of paramount importance that the labourers themselves be not only intelligent but sober and frugal, in order that they may always compete on at least equal terms with the skilled workmen of any other nation.