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to-day, finds every thing provided to meet his wants and to gratify his 

 desires. And born of all this productive activity, is commerce, which, 

 shows all men working for each other and supplying each other. Every 

 man, at his trade, his art, his peculiar work, is doing something for 

 other men ; and the merchant, as the necessary agent, carries the various 

 products from place to place, from country to country, by land and by 

 sea. 



But while labor has always been bestowing blessings upon the world, 

 labor has not always been held honorable. The man who oppressed or 

 robbed the laborer, and feasted in baronial halls, he was the lord and 

 the honorable man. The man who led armies to conflict, deluged the 

 with blood, and spread abroad desolation and woe, he was the hero and 

 tlie honorable man. But he who guided the plough, wielded the sickle, 

 or wrought at a mechanic art, was a degraded serf or bondsman. The 

 productive hand — the hand browned and crusted by industry was the 

 hand of a villein — a slave : but the mailed hand — the murdering and 

 destroying hand — that, was the hand of a gentleman and a noble. The 

 greatest, the most benignant change which has come over the world is 

 that which has made labor and the laborer honorable. 



The times of feudal barbarism are past ; the times of industrial civil- 

 ization have come. This is oiu- age of the world — the age of the tri- 

 umph and the enthronement of industry ! If any coimtry may claim 

 a precedence in honoring industry, that country is ours. The benignant 

 change we have mentioned is found everywhere indeed ; but in a coun- 

 try where from its first peopling by civilized man up to the present mo- 

 ment there has been a constant invasion of ancient forests — a constant 

 repetition of the original struggles of man with a rude nature around 

 liim — a constant display of stupendous improvements by the hand of 

 industry — where the echo of the hunter's rifle has ever been dying away 

 before the echo of the settler's axe, and the sunshine which to-day 

 sporting upon a sea of foliage as it had done for untold centuries, to- 

 morrow warms the cultivated fields, and lights up villages and cities, 

 and smiles upon a busy population — a country where the marvels of la- 

 bor predominate over every thing else, and where the laborer know« no 

 master and is free to work and free to possess, without any inherited 

 incumbrances of rank and titles — a country where the great law of 

 Christianity, announced by its chiefest apostle is fully carried out, that 



