But, without even such small cost, they might have taught the poor many beneficial things. In some places they have taught them manners, which is already much. They might have cheaply taught them merriment also—dancing and singing, for instance. The young English ladies who sit nightly to be instructed themselves, at some cost, in melodies illustrative of the consumption of Camille, and the decline of La Traviata, and the damnation of Don Juan, might have taught every girl peasant in England to join in costless choirs of innocent song. Here and there, perhaps, a gentleman might have been found able to teach his peasantry some science and art. Science and fine art don’t pay; but they cost little. Tithes—not of the income of the country, but of the income, say, of its brewers—nay, probably the sum devoted annually by England to provide drugs for the adulteration of its own beer—would have founded choice little museums, and perfect libraries, in every village. And if here and there an English churchman had been found (such as Dean Stanley) willing to explain to peasants the sculpture of his and their own cathedral, and to read its black letter inscriptions for them; and, on warm Sundays, when they were too sleepy to attend to anything more proper—to tell them a story about some of the people who had built it, or lay buried in it—we perhaps might have been quite as religious as we are, and yet need not now have been offering prizes for competition in art schools, nor lecturing with tender sentiment on the inimitableness of the works of Fra Angelico. These things the great Picnic Party might have taught without cost, and with amusement to themselves. One thing, at least, they were bound to teach, whether it amused them or not—how, day by day, the daily bread they expected their village children to pray to God for, might be earned in accordance with the laws of God. This they might have taught, not only without cost, but with gain. Of all attainable liberties, then, be sure the first to strive for is leave to be useful. Independence you had better cease to talk of (you Americans talk too much about it anyway), for you are dependent on every act of what has been dust for a thousand years, so also, does the course of a thousand years to come, depend upon the little perishing strength that is in you. Now what is your American Picnic Party going to do with its leisure? On that your fate as a Nation hangs. Understand this: Virtue does not consist in doing what will be presently paid, or even paid at all, to you, the virtuous person. It may so chance; or may not. It will be paid, some day; but the vital condition of it, as virtue, is that it shall be content in its own deed, and desirous rather that the pay of it, if any, should be for others; just as it is also the vital condition of vice to be content in its own deed, and desirous that the pay thereof, if any, should be to others.