page_title: Samuel Smiles
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Smiles / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Leeds. www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRsmiles.htm
context_page_description: Samuel Smiles was a Scottish author and government reformer. Although he campaigned on a Chartist platform, he concluded that more progress would come from new attitudes than from new laws. His masterpiece, Self-Help, promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism" and raised Smiles to celebrity status almost overnight.
context_section_description: Self-Help has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism", and it raised Smiles to celebrity status almost overnight.
  The Liberal MP J. A. Roebuck in 1862 called Smiles' Workmen's Earnings, Strikes and Savings "a very remarkable book" and quoted passages from it in a speech.
  George Bernard Shaw, in his Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), called Smiles "that modern Plutarch".
  American inspirational writer Orison Swett Marden was inspired by Samuel Smiles as a result of having read Self-Help during his youth. Decades later, he wrote Pushing to the Front (1894) and became a professional author as a result of Smiles' influence.
  The late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century saw the rise of New Liberalism, Keynesian economics, and socialism, which all viewed thrift unfavourably. The New Liberal economists J. A. Hobson and A. F. Mummery in their Physiology of Industry (1889), claimed that saving resulted in the underemployment of capital and labour during trade depressions. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) by John Maynard Keynes, attempted to replace classical liberal economics.
  In 1905, William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon, praised Smiles: "The Bishop said he had noticed a little tendency in some quarters to disparage the homely energies of life which at one time were so highly thought of. He recalled the appearance of Self-Help, by Samuel Smiles, who 40 or 50 years ago gave lectures at Leeds encouraging young men to engage in self-improvement. His books were read with extraordinary avidity, but there arose a school which taught the existence of the beautiful and to do nothing. That school disparaged thrift and did not pay much attention to character and, perhaps, not much attention to duty".
  The Labour MP David Grenfell, in a debate on the Transitional Payments (Determination of Need) Bill, claimed that the 1932 bill "discriminated not against the unthrifty, the idler, and the waster, but against the industrious, thrifty person, who had to pay a heavy penalty. The Minister of Labour penalized self-help. He poured contempt on Samuel Smiles and all his works".
  The liberal Ernest Benn invoked Smiles in 1949 when praising the virtues of self-help.
  In 1962, the director of the British Institute of Management, John Marsh, said that young men who entered industry needed a sense of service and duty; they must be "men of character who know how to behave well as in phases of success"; they must possess self-discipline in thinking and behaviour: "There is something still to be said for Samuel Smiles's doctrine of self-help".
  The liberal economist F. A. Hayek wrote in 1976 that: "It is probably a misfortune that, especially in the USA, popular writers like Samuel Smiles...have defended free enterprise on the ground that it regularly rewards the deserving, and it bodes ill for the future of the market order that this seems to have become the only defence of it which is understood by the general public. That it has largely become the basis of the self-esteem of the businessman often gives him an air of self-righteousness which does not make him more popular".
caption: Samuel Smiles (8116935276)
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