Book: Duty

Overview
Samuel Smiles’s Duty (1880) advances a forthright Victorian ethic: the good life rests not on claims of rights or flashes of talent but on steady obedience to conscience in ordinary affairs. Framed as a companion to Self-Help and Character, the book gathers moral counsel, historical sketches, and maxims to argue that private integrity and public spirit are mutually sustaining. Duty, for Smiles, is the daily practice of truthfulness, industry, thrift, temperance, and kindness, exercised first at home and then radiating outward to workplace, neighborhood, and nation.

Argument and Scope
Smiles organizes his reflections around the circles of obligation. He begins with duty to oneself, insisting that self-command, good temper, and perseverance are the roots of reliability and usefulness. From there he moves to the family, where parental devotion, domestic economy, and faithful companionship shape character more surely than schools or laws. He then treats duty in business and labor, condemning shoddy work, dishonesty, and gambling, and praising punctuality, fairness between employers and employed, and the keeping of one’s word as the true capital of commerce. Finally, he develops duty to the community and country: respect for law, public-spirited participation, and willingness to serve, whether in humble offices or in moments of crisis.

Method and Illustrations
Smiles writes by example. He threads the book with brisk portraits of engineers, reformers, nurses, soldiers, and statesmen who fused competence with conscience. Their heroism is often quiet, hours of patient study, careful accounts, steadfast service, rather than theatrical. He also cites failures of duty, idleness, luxury, cynicism, to show how private laxity breeds public harm. The point is cumulative: character is built in small acts, and small acts decide large outcomes.

Religion, Conscience, and Happiness
Without doctrinal heaviness, Smiles anchors duty in a theistic view of conscience as an internal law. True freedom is not escape from obligation but the disciplined ability to do what one ought. Happiness follows duty as its consequence, not its aim. Cheerfulness, he maintains, springs from useful exertion, mutual helpfulness, and a clear conscience more than from amusement or fortune.

Social Philosophy
The book speaks to an industrial, democratic society unsettled by rapid change. Smiles does not deny social ills, but he trusts moral energy, habits, associations, and voluntary effort, more than sweeping schemes. He counsels charity joined to prudence: help that uplifts by encouraging effort, not dependence. He also stresses reciprocity: citizens owe the state honesty and work; authorities owe justice and example. Rights and duties are interlocked, yet he insists that secure rights typically arise where duty is widely practiced.

Style and Tone
The prose is clear, aphoristic, and exhortatory, stitched with classical and scriptural echoes. Smiles avoids abstraction, preferring homely images, well-kept tools, a tidy ledger, an orderly hearth, that translate moral counsel into daily routines. The tone is warm but firm, confident that steady virtues can be taught and caught.

Place in Smiles’s Oeuvre and Legacy
Duty completes Smiles’s trilogy on personal and civic formation. Where Self-Help highlights initiative and Character explores moral fiber, Duty concentrates on obligations that bind persons together. Its Victorian paternalism and faith in incremental reform reflect its age, yet its core insistence endures: that a healthy commonwealth rests on millions of modest fidelities, truth told, work well done, promises kept, neighbors aided, long before crises summon spectacular acts.