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It is wonderfully exciting to read the adventures of a shipwrecked mariner; to find him cast away on a desert island, destitute of everything that before seemed necessary to his very existence; to see him settling himself down in a strange and untried form of life, substituting one thing for another, doing altogether without some other thing, turning constantly from expedient to expedient, bending to his will the circumstances that seemed his fate, and at length naturalising himself to the place, and living bravely on, truly and literally the Monarch of all he surveys. The avidity with which we drink in such details, seems to depend upon some principle in our nature; for a feeling of the same kind is excited by all other narrations of vicissitude. The picture of calamity would be merely tiresome, were it not for the rebound we expect: we want to see what the unfortunate whose story we follow will do; by what steps he will try to reascend, or by what expedients he will make for himself a new world in the depths to which he has fallen. This principle is known to the skilful novelist, and he is the most successful who knows it best. It is to the complete gratification afforded to the mystical sympathy referred to—the sympathy, not with calamity, but with struggle—that Robinson Crusoe owes its distinction as the most universally popular of all works of fiction; for although the facts of the narrative had probably never any actual existence, they are so rendered as to be instinctively received as the component parts of a thing eternally true in nature.

But in actual life the Robinson Crusoes are few, and the shipwrecked mariners many. The mass of castaways, when they find themselves separated from their kind, their comforts, their necessaries, yield, after a few feeble efforts, or without effort at all, to what is called their fate, and die of cold, or hunger, or despair. These multitudes we take no note of. They pass away from the earth like shadows; or, if our eye follows them for a moment till the view is lost in the crowding incidents of life, we look upon them as the victims of unavoidable and irresistible circumstances, and so turn calmly away. But it would be well to examine this notion; to contrast the victims with the vanquishers; to inquire whether the train of circumstances really differed in their several cases; and so to ascertain the share individual character may have had in the result. Let us, by all means, continue to pity the victims, whether we find their bones bleaching in the desert, or stirred on the shore by the tide; but it may be suspected that we ought to pity them less for the hardness of their fate than for the weakness which could not withstand it. A French writer has finely said, that history is the struggle of the human race with destiny. Even so, we think, is the history of individuals.

Look abroad into ordinary life, and examine the condition of its castaways. One finds himself alone in the crowd of mankind, with wind and tide against him, surrounded by influences like evil spirits, the earth dry and famished under his foot, and the heavens black with thunder above his head. He has no experience, little physical strength, only ordinary talent; but he has nerve and will: he can plod when necessary; he can stoop or climb as the time demands; he can cut a new path when he loses the old one; and so, step by step, he goes on—this gallant Crusoe—till he has conquered circumstances and reached a secure shelter. Another man: but here we must speak of crowds and classes, for imbecility affects whole regions of society at once. A certain branch of industry, we shall say—agriculture, handloom weaving, anything—is struck with decay, and its followers thrown out of employment. What course do the unfortunates take? They sit down and curse their day; they appeal to the sympathies of their more successful brethren; they lean idly wherever they can find support; and failing this, they starve in a body, or drift into the workhouses. In such circumstances, men seldom think even of the obvious expedient of changing their locality, far less of changing their employment. They are rooted to the soil like a plant; when the work they have been accustomed to is no longer wanted, they cross their hands; and so they remain, and wither, and despair, and die. Thus when the kelp business was at an end, the Scotch Highlanders sat down in their helpless hunger, till they were swept as with a besom out of the land they cumbered. Yet what Mechi has done for his Tiptree bog on a large scale, with expensive machinery, and hired labour, might have been done by each of them on a small scale, without expense, and with his own labour. A wholesome living might be wrested by determined men from the wildest nook in Scotland, and the sea alone would support a large population. What the people did, however, was merely to pick up such shell-fish as the waves chanced to throw at their feet, and hold out their lean hands for national charity.

As we ascend in society, a similar spectacle presents itself. All trades and professions, without exception, are crowded with once well-doing individuals, who now serve only to cumber the ground, and obstruct the progress of others. Whatever be his reverses, a man seems to think it necessary to abide by his employment and his station, even if he starves in the one, and excites pity or ridicule in the other. He will not see that he has suffered shipwreck; that he has been thrown into entirely new circumstances; that he must disengage himself from old habits and prejudices, and construct anew his scheme of life. He is one of a tribe, and must stand or fall by his profession and his order. He has lost all perception of his own individuality, and is afraid to take a single step that is not prescribed by custom and example. But, independently of the Robinson Crusoes of the class, many such slaves of conventionalism achieve their freedom while intending only to better their condition. They emigrate to a new country, and find themselves actually in a desert island—an oasis in the wilderness—where it is necessary to work at whatever employment offers the means of subsistence—to resort to all sorts of shifts and expedients, and to submit cheerfully to the deprivation of things they had in former times reckoned necessaries of life. The change is found to be conducive to vigour both of mind and body. The indolent become active, the delicate, strong. Neither the physical nor moral constitution is easily injured, except by the influences of artificial life. A man who dares not sit by an open window for fear of the draught of air, if thrown upon a rock in the sea—exposed for days and nights to all the winds that blow, wet, cold, and starving—sustains no injury. Persons in this situation, or similar ones, have remarked over and over again with astonishment, that they were never in better health in their lives!

The beneficial effect of emigration on the character and habits of the lazzaroni of Ireland, is sufficient to indicate the cause of many of the great evils of social life at home. People will not recognise the fact, that they are castaways of fortune, and require to scramble as well as they can for a subsistence. They like to read of the struggles of the Robinson Crusoes, but never think of imitating them. They have not imagination enough to see the analogy between such positions and their own; and it is not till they actually find themselves in some far-away desert, that the slumbering energies of their character are awakened. Then they have nothing to lean upon but their industry—nothing to look to but their ingenuity. Expedients must take the place of habits; necessity must be their law instead of prescription; the chains of conventionality—as strong among the lowest as among the highest—drop from their limbs, and the man rises up from the ruins of the slave and beggar. This consummation, however, is not the invariable result. Even emigration only increases, although to a large extent, the number of Crusoes; and there is still a portion of the people who drift to and fro as helplessly as sea-weed. But at home, the bulk of the people are in this condition; they have no capacity for expedients, which are the stepping-stones of progress. A resolute tradesman, when one thing fails, tries another; when one process is found tedious or expensive, he has recourse to another; and in the same way the whole of society is on the move onward and upward. But the movers are not the mass; they are the stirring spirits of the time, at whose ceaseless work the multitude gaze unreflectingly, grumbling when their own occupation grows scanty, and looking for relief, not to themselves, but to their neighbours, their superiors, their rulers.

Some time ago, a correspondent of ours, struck apparently with the true cause of the evil—the tyranny of conventional feeling—deprecated the emigration of those classes supposed to be the most slavishly subjected to it, without having previously made a trial of their energies. He proposed that every 'genteel' family, before setting their lives and fortune upon the cast, should establish themselves for a time in some solitary district of their own country, remote from the comforts and conveniences of life, and try whether their industry and ingenuity were of an available kind. He seemed to be of opinion that in most cases the experiment would fail, and that thus many an unfortunate expedition into the wildernesses beyond seas would be prevented. We are of the same opinion, only we do not think either the experiment fair or the result desirable. The very atmosphere of our country is pervaded by a conventionalism which, as is proved by what passes every day before our eyes, cannot be counteracted by mere external circumstances. The family in question would feel themselves to be only amateur Crusoes; they would be haunted by the idea, that they were surrounded, at a distance of only a day or two's travel, by the 'genteel' society of which they had formed a part; and, above all, they would have the consciousness perpetually before them, of being able to withdraw from the adventure as soon as they lost heart. This last consideration of itself would be fatal. Nothing rouses energy and strengthens determination so effectually as the knowledge that we are irretrievably committed: the climber of some desperate but possible steep is never safe till the rope is cut beneath him; the crosser of a difficult ford is never sure of completing the feat till he has

The family, therefore, might fail in their experiment, and yet be fully adequate to the struggles of actual emigration.

The humanitarians of the day, though full of a fine Crusoe spirit themselves, seem not to recognise its necessity as a general principle. They draw a distinction that has no existence in nature between the classes they design to benefit and themselves, legislating for their protÉgÉs in the fashion of a permanent providence. They know that a very large part of the population must labour with their hands for hire—that this is an indispensable condition of all civilised society. They know likewise that the labour-market is necessarily full of vicissitude, that work of particular kinds is constantly shifting its place, now from one street to another, now from one town to another, now from one province to another. It would seem, therefore, to be their cue, to fit the labourer for the changes that are liable to beset the way of life he has chosen, or into which he has been thrown; to imbue him with the noble Crusoe spirit of adventure and expedient; and to leave his hands free to embrace his fortune wherever it may offer. But no such thing. Their grand effort at present appears to be, to chain him to the spot on which he happens to stand, by making him the possessor of some small house, or some small plot of ground. If the labour-market were permanent in its demand, exactly proportioned to the existing numbers, and yet elastic enough to meet the movement of population, this would be an excellent plan; but as it is, it may be doubted whether there is not in a system which restricts the locomotion of the workman, the germ of a great evil, both to the class to which he belongs and to the cause of general progress. It seems to us that this plan, which is now making such rapid strides over the whole kingdom, is in antagonism with the other great influences that are occupied in developing the character of the age. While railway transit and steam navigation are labouring to break the chains that bound the workman to the locality in which he grew, the various land-investment societies are doing everything in their power to rivet them anew. But this hint must be understood as applied to the system in its general, not special application. There can be no doubt of its admirable effect in multitudes of individual cases: what we disapprove of, is the manner in which it addresses itself to the working-class as a body.

That no external circumstances at home, however terrible or desperate, can struggle successfully, except in a small minority of cases, with the spirit of conventionalism and the inert force of habit, is proved by what is passing around us in society. But it may at least be hoped, that reason is able to exercise a power which appears not to reside in the mechanical pressure of events. The misfortune is, that the calamities of life do not find our minds in a state of preparation to meet them. We have formed no À priori theory. We are able to sink, and to suffer—some of us bravely; we are able, when necessary, to 'die like the wolf in silence;' but of manly struggle we are incapable. Now, we have a plan of our own to propose, in which, we think, resides the grand arcanum of social regeneration. Have you guessed it, intelligent reader? It is simply this: read Robinson Crusoe. But not as formerly. Do not regard it as a romance. Look upon it as a mirror of human life, in which the fortunes of men—in which your own possible fortunes are figured with photographic truth; and learn from it how to meet, how to resist, how to subdue them. Forget not, when overtaken by heavy misfortunes, that you have suffered shipwreck; and do not fancy that your desert island is a land flowing with milk and honey. Look at things as they are. Listen to the wind as it moans along the water, and to the sea as it breaks on that dread lee-shore. Remember that your safety depends upon your own courage, your own energy, your own ingenuity. Do not dream that you hear amid the din the voices of friends and comrades, for that is proved by everyday experience to be a delusion: and, above all things, if you be of the station in which conventionalism is strongest, do not fancy that the eyes of genteel people are staring at you through the gloom!