{"product_id":"2940148759263","title":"Smoking and Drinking by James Parton","description":"The next very important thing that man has to attend to is his health.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn some other respects, progress has been made during the last hundred years, and several considerable obstacles to the acquisition of a stable happiness have been removed or diminished.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the best parts of the best countries, so much knowledge is now freely offered to all the young as suffices to place within their reach all existing knowledge. We may say with confidence that the time is not distant when, in the United States, no child will live farther than four miles from a school-house, kept open four months in the year, and when there will be the beginning of a self-sustaining public library in every town and village of a thousand inhabitants. This great business of making knowledge universally accessible is well in hand; it has gone so far that it must go on till the work is complete.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this country, too, if nowhere else, there is so near an approach to perfect freedom of thinking, that scarcely any one, whose conduct is good, suffers inconvenience from professing any extreme or eccentricity of mere opinion. I constantly meet, in New England villages, men who differ as widely as possible from their neighbors on the most dividing of all subjects; but if they are good citizens and good neighbors, I have never observed that they were the less esteemed on that account. Their peculiarities of opinion become as familiar as the color of their hair, or the shape of their every-day hat, and as inoffensive. This is a grand triumph of good sense and good nature; or, as Matthew Arnold would say, of the metropolitan over the provincial spirit. It is also recent. It was not the case fifty years ago. It was not the case twenty years ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe steam-engine, and the wondrous machinery which the steam-engine moves, have so cheapened manufactured articles, that a mechanic, in a village, may have so sufficient a share of the comforts, conveniences, and decencies of life, that it is sometimes hard to say what real advantage his rich neighbor has over him. The rich man used to have one truly enviable advantage over others: his family was safer, in case of his sudden death. But a mechanic, who has his home paid for, his life insured, and a year's subsistence accumulated, is as secure in this respect as, perhaps, the nature of human affairs admits. Now, an American workingman, anywhere out of a few largest cities, can easily have all these safeguards around his family by the time he is forty; and few persons can be rich before they are forty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe may say, perhaps, speaking generally, that, in the United States, there are no formidable obstacles to the attainment of substantial welfare, except...","brand":"Unforgotten Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47156286423280,"sku":"2940148759263","price":1.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940148759263_p0.jpg?v=1763708110","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940148759263","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}