TWELFTH DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 743 



paint no pictures, write no poems, carve no statues. And were the artisan 

 or farmer all mechanical skill, he would build no houses, weave no cloth, 

 manage no farms. All man's powers are needed in each of the broad divis- 

 ions of human labor, though combined in varying proportions. Each grade 

 of labor is dependent on every other, and the higher the grade, the greater 

 is that dependence. 



That "the ideal must have a real to stand upon" is a principle applica- 

 ble to the development of nations as well as to art. Every nation that has 

 become famous for general culture, art, or a high status of humanity, has 

 first had a firm basis in material prosperity. Witness Holland, Venice, 

 and Greece. And all the prophetic groans regarding our American haste 

 to accumulate wealth, and its supposed tendency to destroy the sensibility 

 to better things, and to render impossible the higher forms of existence, are 

 the short-sightedness of those who cannot understand the conditions of 

 national growth. Even the very degree of force and ambition now thrown 

 into mercenary pursuits, argues well for our potentiality as a people; and 

 the energy now absorbed by growing and building and manufacturing, will 

 one day, when the impulse of production is satisfied and sufficient wealth 

 accumulated, be turned with equal force and result into the development of 

 art and literature. Especially is this true of our own coast, where the natural 

 conditions are extremely favorable to artistic life. We are right in being 

 proud of the industrial rank of our State and country; and we should not 

 blush when some Arnoldesque apostle of culture, as narrow in his own 

 sphere as the narrowest farmer is in his, asks us what we have done except 

 to plant, to dig, to build, and to manufacture. We should only be solicit- 

 ous that our planting is thoughtful, our digging thorough, our building 

 strong, and our manufacturing honest. We can then face the sneers at the 

 youthful crudeness of our country, and assure our critics that our artistic 

 and literary development will come in good time, and will be the richer 

 and stronger for our long and healthy childhood. 



It is this thoroughness and heartiness with which our industrial labor is 

 performed that must make us respect ourselves as individuals and others 

 respect us as a people. We hear much high-sounding oratory expended 

 in proclaiming the honorableness of labor. Men who neither know what 

 labor is, nor what honor is, have shouted this shibboleth from rostrums 

 until the matter has become farcical. Labor, as such, is neither honor- 

 able nor dishonorable. A man's work, merely as work, never honors him; 

 neither does it dishonor him. It is the honor of the man reflected in his 

 work that honors him, or the weakness and dishonor of the man apparent 

 in his work that dishonors him. Honor, like honesty, is a human attri- 

 bute, and neither that nor its opposite can be anything inherent in work. 

 So that it is only by a figure of speech that we can call any species of labor 

 dishonorable or otherwise. It is by association merely that a kind of 

 labor that falls into the hands of a degraded and dishonest class of persons 

 comes to have a suggestion of degradation or dishonor. 



When the sturdy old Anglo-Saxon kings planted farms and dug ditches 

 were they the less honored for it? If all manufacturers were fearlessly 

 honest, hrgh minded, commanding, and agreeable in personality, would 

 even the most fastidious consider manufacturing dishonorable ? Were all 

 farmers alert, intellectual, and refined, would they, in the eyes of any but 

 a certain superficial class, whose opinions are not worth regarding, stand 

 beneath the lawyer or the physician in the social scale ? It is not working 

 with the hands that is degrading, but working with the hands without the 

 brain. Such work is always servile, and generally poor in quality. There 

 are, undoubtedly, tendencies in certain kinds of labor to induce intellectual 



