"Heaven helps those who help themselves"

CHAPTER I - SELF-HELP - NATIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL

"The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the
individuals composing it."
- J. S. Mill.

"We put too much faith in systems, and look too little to men."
-B. Disraeli.


"Heaven helps those who help themselves" is a well-tried maxim,
embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience.
The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the
individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the
true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is
often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably
invigorates. Whatever is done FOR men or classes, to a certain
extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for
themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-
government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively
helpless.

Even the best institutions can give a man no active help. Perhaps
the most they can do is, to leave him free to develop himself and
improve his individual condition. But in all times men have been
prone to believe that their happiness and well-being were to be
secured by means of institutions rather than by their own conduct.
Hence the value of legislation as an agent in human advancement has
usually been much over-estimated. To constitute the millionth part
of a Legislature, by voting for one or two men once in three or
five years, however conscientiously this duty may be performed, can
exercise but little active influence upon any man's life and
character. Moreover, it is every day becoming more clearly
understood, that the function of Government is negative and
restrictive, rather than positive and active; being resolvable
principally into protection - protection of life, liberty, and
property. Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the
enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body,
at a comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however
stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident,
or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means
of individual action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits,
rather than by greater rights.

The Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the
reflex of the individuals composing it. The Government that is
ahead of the people will inevitably be dragged down to their level,
as the Government that is behind them will in the long run be
dragged up. In the order of nature, the collective character of a
nation will as surely find its befitting results in its law and
government, as water finds its own level. The noble people will be
nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt ignobly. Indeed all
experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a State
depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the
character of its men. For the nation is only an aggregate of
individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of
the personal improvement of the men, women, and children of whom
society is composed.

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and
uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness,
selfishness, and vice. What we are accustomed to decry as great
social evils, will, for the most part, be found to be but the
outgrowth of man's own perverted life; and though we may endeavour
to cut them down and extirpate them by means of Law, they will only
spring up again with fresh luxuriance in some other form, unless
the conditions of personal life and character are radically
improved. If this view be correct, then it follows that the
highest patriotism and philanthropy consist, not so much in
altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and
stimulating men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free
and independent individual action.

It may be of comparatively little consequence how a man is governed
from without, whilst everything depends upon how he governs himself
from within. The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a
despot, great though that evil be, but he who is the thrall of his
own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice. Nations who are thus
enslaved at heart cannot be freed by any mere changes of masters or
of institutions; and so long as the fatal delusion prevails, that
liberty solely depends upon and consists in government, so long
will such changes, no matter at what cost they may be effected,
have as little practical and lasting result as the shifting of the
figures in a phantasmagoria. The solid foundations of liberty must
rest upon individual character; which is also the only sure
guarantee for social security and national progress.

Excerpt from "Self Help; With Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance"
by Samuel Smiles
Scanned and proofed by David Price