Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great ReformersHubbard, Elbert
History
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers
Hubbard, Elbert
Reformers
His religion was one of friendship for humanity, and to him man was
the highest expression of divinity. Also, he believed that the love of
God could never even have been imagined were it not for the loves of
men and women.
* * * * *
John Bright was born in Eighteen Hundred Eleven. He was the
culminating flower of seven generations of Quaker ancestry. His father
was a rich manufacturer at Rochdale, and being a Quaker, did not try
the dubious experiment of making his children exempt from useful work
in the name of education.
Be it known that John Bright had no part in that aristocratic and
somewhat costly invention known as Bright's disease. This was the work
of Doctor Richard Bright, a distant kinsman.
The parents of John Bright were both public speakers, and little John
was an orator through prenatal tendency. A good plan for parents, or
possible parents, to follow is to educate themselves in the interests
of posterity, and this without asking that foolish question propounded
by an Irish Member of Parliament, "What has posterity ever done for
us?"
So this, then, is the recipe for educating your children: Educate
yourself.
Beyond this, man inherits himself; he is both ancestor and posterity.
I am today what I am because I was what I was last year; and next year
I will be what I will be, because I am now what I ata. These were
truths which were, very early in life, familiar to John Bright. Before
he could speak without a childish lisp, his mother taught him to
decide on his own actions. "I don't want to study; can't I go and wade
in the brook?" once asked little John of his mother.
"Thee better go into the next room and listen for the Voice, then do
as it says," answered the mother.
The boy went into the next room and soon returned, saying, "The Voice
says I must study hard for half an hour and then I can go and wade in
the brook."
"Very well," was the reply; "we must always obey the Voice."
At this time there was a wave of Socialism sweeping over England,
originated largely by Robert Owen, a Welshman, who at the age of
nineteen became manager, by divine right, of a Manchester cotton-mill.
He was a man of splendid initiative, noble resources, generous
impulses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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