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individuals who from the creature, or article exhibited, shall be consid- 

 ered most worthy of a bonus from the Society. This is done only as 

 an incentive — as a means of promoting the great ennobling objects of 

 the association. Since the time when ''the voice of the Lord God was 

 heard walking in the garden in the cool of the day," from whose pree- 

 ence our federal head, conscious of their iniquity, "hid themselves 

 among the trees," man has emphatically been compelled to labor that 

 he may live. For his sake the ground has been cursed. Thorns and 

 thistles it has brought forth. The herb of the field have we been com- 

 pelled to eat, exhibiting the truth of the awful climax of Jehovah's 

 sentence to apostate Adam : " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat 

 bread, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken, 

 for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return." 



Whatever we eat, whatever we drink, or wear, is the result of labor, 

 both of body and of mind ; and he who attempts to live without labor 

 is like the condemned criminal seeking to avoid the just sentence of the 

 law by an escape from prison, adding a still higher offense to the cata- 

 logue of his crime. Of labor none need be ashamed. It is one of 

 the conditions upon which an overruling Providence has vouchsafed to 

 us all earthly comforts. Indeed, so conscious is man in his degenerate 

 state, of the impossibility of avoiding so just a sentence, without at the 

 same time involving himself still deeper in transgression, that none but 

 the most daring and unprincipled think of obtaining a livelihood except 

 by the sweat of the brow, through the instrumentality of labor freely 

 bestowed. "Idleness," it has been truly said, " is the parent of many 

 vices." It id equally true, that industrious habits leads to a thousand ■ 

 other virtues. The student never becomes a ripe scholar without labor. 

 To become a good farmer, a good mechanic, a good physician, or a good 

 lawyer, requires not only the study but the labor of years. Hence it 

 was the remark of one of the greatest philosophers America ever pro- 

 duced : 



" He that by the plow would thrive, 

 Must either hold himself or driye." 



The idea, then, that labor is degrading, is the offspring of a vicious 

 imagination — a suggestion to which no individual, seeking his own best 

 interest, will ever listen. Such are the laws of physical Nature, made 

 so by an AH- wise Creator, that a certain amount of labor is indispensa- 



