Effort, inward energy, power of will, being thus the distinguishing attribute of manhood, or, rather, selfhood, the fatigue which comes from overwork is not so intolerable to bear as the listlessness which torments the wretch who is sunk in the "sleepy drench" of laziness; and, in our present state, the practical fall of man is his fall from a worker into an idler. However much our desire may be for ease, our real happiness is in activity; yet the difficulty of urging body and mind into effort is so great that the ideal of many working people is still inactive enjoyment—an ideal which their very nature makes impossible of realization. How many men there are, farmers, mechanics, merchants, lawyers, who labor vigorously, looking forward hopefully to the time when the results of their labor will enable them to be loafers! The thought, indeed, is carried beyond the present life. Miss Marsh, in one of her novels, tells us of a British "navvy" saying to his mate: "I wonder, Bill, whether it be true what they say of heaven being so happy-whether it can be happier than sitting here in the public over a jug of ale, with the fiddle going? I don't know a pleasure as comes up to that!" And by how many persons higher in the mental and moral scale than this navvy is Paradise conceived of as a state in which there is an everlasting continuance of pious laziness,-as if the worst impiety, in heaven as on earth, was not slothful inaction!

But man, being, as I have said, essentially an active being, he must find in activity his joy as well as his duty and glory. And labor, like everything else that is good, is its own exceeding great reward. It is sanitary. Guizot, the great French statesman, said at a meeting of his friends: "After my sudden downfall, in February, 1848, I resolved to drown my grief by hard work. I preserved myself, as it were, in hard work; and it made me again wonderfully hale, active, and vigorous.' "Every man's task,". says Emerson, "is his life-preserver." Remember that, and you will never fret at unremunerated, unrecognized, unrecorded, even unbelieved-in toil. The moment, indeed, the first indisposition to labor is overcome by personal effort, the power to work gradually grows into a habit of working, until at last the exercise of will becomes instinctive and almost automatic. The man possesses his appetites, passions, and intelligence, and is not, like the loafer, possessed by them. He is the master, and not the slave, of his belongings. By continued effort he obtains the manliest of all feel

ings, the feeling of personal efficiency, and he thus not only gets a living but gets life. The result of his labor may not be the acquisition of any great amount of wealth or any extended stores of knowledge, but it will surely be an integrity of character without which wealth is as poor as poverty and knowledge as blind as ignorance. Only let him start with the truth that labor of some kind is a good in itself, independent of its success in obtaining the object desired, and he will never think his time has been wasted because his ambition has been thwarted. He will find that he has been building up himself, though the airy edifice of his hopes may have tumbled into "cureless ruin," and that he is more man than he was, though less rich or famous than he counted on being.

Now, of all nations in the world, the United States should be the most intolerant to loafers and the most hospitable to laborers, from whatever land they come. Our country is, and is to be, the great field of the laborer, for its undeveloped natural resources exceed those of all other countries, and it needs the work of every head and hand, of every soul and body, in its wide domain. Our mission is to educate men for work, and not for the shirking of work. Whatever may be said of us, let it never be said that we are a loafing nation. Loafing nations are those in which the customs, habits, religion of a people invite misgovernment, and misgovernment reacts on the national character further to enfeeble and deprave it. India is a loafing nation; her chief religion, Brahminism, is simply loafing spiritualized, and her population of a hundred and fifty millions is held in subjection by a handful of English soldiers and civilians in consequence of the fact that, like the poor mother of little Paul Dombey, she will not, or cannot, "make an effort." Turkey is a loafing nation. Whole provinces which now, under Ottoman rule, are sterile and poor, were formerly among the richest dependencies of the Roman Empire; and Turkey is "the sick man" of European diplomacy because Turkey is a synonyme of arrogant laziness, superstition, and ignorance. Spain is a loafing nation-a nation ruined by a series of loafing monarchs and loafing prime ministers, of loafing tyrants and no less loafing liberals, and exhibiting what remains to it of political life only in spasms of insurrection, which lead to few or no results in good government.

Our "poor whites" at the South have long enjoyed the reputation, as a body, of thinking it more honorable to loaf than to

labor. It was at first feared that the negroes would also aspire to the honors of loaferdom when they were emancipated, but that fear has been happily dispelled by experience; and, indeed, it was hardly reasonable to predict that the race which had done nearly all the work of the South would become idlers the moment they were offered wages for working.

In strong contrast to the loafing are the laboring nations. Compare Turkey, for example, with Holland or Belgium. Holland has been won from the sea at an expense in diking of some fifteen hundred millions of dollars; its territory is only about 12,000 square miles, or less than half of the area of South Carolina; and yet it supports a population of three millions and a half. Its fens, bogs, and sandy heaths have been converted by industry and thrift into fertile fields and smiling meadows, and the revenue of the kingdom is forty-five millions of dollars. Belgium, with an area of about 12,500 square miles, a population of five millions, a revenue of thirty millions, is really a mere sandbank, which the labor of its inhabitants has transformed into the garden of Europe. Both countries have been repeatedly devastated by wars of long duration, and each is now burdened with the expense of an army as large in proportion to its population as that of France or Austria. The Turkish Empire in Europe and Asia is over 600,000 square miles in extent, includes provinces of immense natural fertility, is rich in every element of wealth which nature can lavish on ungrateful man; and yet it cannot support, in squalor and ignorance, a seventh part of the population to the square mile of territory which Belgium and Holland support in comparative comfort and intelligence. So much for the difference between a nation that loafs and a nation that labors!

But while there is little danger that our country will descend to the level of Turkey and Spain, we can still draw many lessons of skill, industry, and economy from Belgium and Holland. The peculiar advantage of American labor is that, owing to the immense extent and exhaustless undeveloped resources of the country, population here does not press on subsistence as it does on the most industrious European countries. Our population is but little more than the population of Great Britain and Ireland; but the area of Great Britain and Ireland is only 125,000 square miles, while the area of the United States is 3,480,000 square miles, without counting in Walrussia. The coal regions of the

United States alone cover a space larger by 100,000 square miles than the whole area of the United Kingdom, and yet the latter mines four times more millions of tons of coal a year than we do. But it is evident that the natural resources of Great Britain have a limit, while ours are practically unlimited.

The difficulty with England, as compared with this country, is its restricted area. Population there has increased with the increase of wealth, and it has no outlet but in emigration. The connection of this increased population with the progress of mechanical invention is quite striking. The England of Elizabeth, the England of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, Raleigh, and Sidney, the England of the year 1600, contained less than four millions of people. In 1801 it contained a little more than nine millions of people. In 1861 it contained 20,228,497 people, its population more than doubling in sixty years. The England of Elizabeth had about the population of the State of New York; the England of Victoria has two-thirds of the population of the United States. The area of territory is the same, namely, 58,600 square miles-less by about 8,000 square miles than that of the State of Missouri. It is the labor and inventive genius of her people which enable her to support four times the population that she did when she was called "merrie England."

But the special increase of her population from 1801 to 1861, amounting to eleven millions, and the increase in national wealth which such an increase in population implies, were not due to the wisdom of her statesmen or the skill of her generals,-not to Pitt, Fox, Grenville, Liverpool, Wellington, Canning, Grey, Russell, Palmerston; but to the genius of her inventors and engineers,―to Watt, Arkwright, Hargreaves, Bramah, Maudsley, Brindley, Davy, Cartwright, and Stephenson,-who created wealth faster than statesmen and generals could destroy it. In ancient times such men would have been deified; now the historian honors them with less space than he devotes to a Parliamentary debate or to a description of a skirmish; and the capitalist who thrives by them is apt to be of the opinion of that wealthy ironmonger who told Dr. Percy, in reference to inventors, that "brains were more abundant than capital, and ought therefore to be had cheap."

Now, the inventors I have mentioned, and their successors, have added to the productive force of England an amount of mechanical power which is equivalent to the manual labor of

five hundred millions of men; so that, if you should compute the labor-doing machines as laborers, you might say that the England of Elizabeth had a population of four millions, and the England of Victoria a population of five hundred and twenty millions, as, in addition to the twenty millions that are to be lodged, fed, clothed, and educated, there are five hundred millions that only require for food a little coal, that can lodge by the ten thousand in one little room, and whose education consists in the contrivances of their human overseers to double or treble their working capacity. Much as has been said regarding the misery of the English working classes, it must still be admitted that England supports twenty millions of people in more comfort than she supported nine milllions in 1800 and four millions in 1600. The poorer classes are not indebted for their poverty altogether to the low rate of wages; the low rate of morals has its share in it.

Still, I would not underrate the poverty of English workmen, owing to the pressure of population on subsistence. But suppose that England, with only the population she had two hundred years ago, had the mechanical aids and agencies of the present century. That is about our condition, and that gives the American laborer a peculiar, an unparalleled, advantage over his brethren of the old world. All the inventions of the past serve him; all the best inventive wits of the present time are contriving, night and day, new machines to supplement or supplant his roughest toil, and to demand more and more work from his brain and less and less from his muscles. He is a citizen of a country in which unskilled labor is better remunerated than the skilled labor of Europe; and skilled labor, as a general thing, is better paid than the labor of the majority of lawyers, doctors, and clergymen. The only fear is that competition will not here be sufficiently active to be educational; for it is the amount of mind which a man puts into his work which determines its dignity and its value; and to stimulate an unskilled workman with the ambition to be a skilled one should be the first object of our popular institutions. That handicraftsman, says Smiles, "whose heart is in his calling, feels as much honest pride in turning out a piece of thoroughly good workmanship as the sculptor or painter does in executing a statue or a picture." When the artisan has thus the feeling of the artist, he finds in his work his