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little extent, perhaps, even in our own cities, among certain dasees who 

 have been rather roughly, perhaps, but not inappropriately, styled the 

 "Codfish aristocracy of Democracy ;" to have held them up to a well 

 merited contempt; to have traced them through their vicious system of 

 education — their various roimds of dissipation ; and to have shown that 

 whUe they consider honest labor dishonorable, they actually labor hard- 

 er in everything which is dishonorable, and enjoy less of life, than the 

 honest laborer. 



I intended to have followed some of them to the gambling table — 

 to their other haunts of vice, to the dram shop, and — just one door be- 

 yond — to the State Prison, where many of them are compelled to la- 

 bor at last. I intended to pursue them through the various stages of 

 their wearisome and worthless existence, disease and premature decay, 

 to dishonorable graves ; to have shown that those who despise labor do 

 not live out half their days ; that their tendency is always downward, 

 to poverty, crime and wretchedness, while the tendency of labor, is to 

 elevate, enrich, and improve. That the most successful men in our great 

 cities, as merchants and professional men — that the greatest names in 

 our history — sprimg from the countiy ; from the ranks of the laboring 

 population, the workshop and the field ; and finally, to have shown that 

 the poor day laborer — male or female — is more honorable, in every 

 just sense of the word, than the proudest aristocrat of either sex, who 

 despises labor ; that the poor hired girl, who has learned to wash dish- 

 es or bake a loaf of bread, and works for her dollar a week, is entitled 

 to, and should receive more consideration in American society, than 

 that purely artificial being, who has been taught to despise every useful 

 employment ; to think nothing so vulgar as common sense ; spending 

 her time in the reading of yellow-covered hterature — sighing over 

 imaginary woes of imaginary beings, but deaf to the suflerings of real 

 life around her, because she does not find them described in the last 

 new novel. 



But I must pay my respects to these interesting gentry, on some other 

 occasion, trusting that you will agree with me as to the honor and dig- 

 nity of human labor. 



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