Rugby Tennessee Author:Thomas Hughes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. OUR HANDICRAFTSMEN. But have we even yet faced the whole of our present national distress in this department ? Pressing as this question of ne... more »w and wholesome outlets for our gentry and trading class has of late become, is it not a much older one, now become chronic, with the great mass of our people who live by the labour of their hands— handicraftsmen as they are named in our old tongue ? And again, are not these they who need help most, and the helping of whom will bring back health most quickly to the national circulation, and enable heart and lungs and brain to play more freely ? Now it will probably in these days be generally admitted—and is certainly the opinion of this writer —that the condition of the handicraftsman is the one which most concerns this, and all other nations. And for this simple reason, that if the base of a pyramid is strong and sound, we need feel little anxiety about the upper portions. Where this is so, the worst that can happen to the upper parts is, gently to crumble away; but, even then, they will just filter down into the interstices, filling up the gaps in the structure, and wherever they stop helping to strengthen the foundations. Their disappearance may perhaps injure the picturesqueness of the building, but will not undermine its strength. The vital point is, to look to foundations. But admitting all this to the fullest extent — admitting further, that, in spite of the great improvement in the condition and prospects of English manual labourers in the last thirty years, very much remains to be done before we can feel anything like security as to the foundations of our social pyramid—we may safely leave our handicraftsmen on one side in considering the question intended to be raised in these pages. For we are concerned he...« less