NORTH KENNEBEC SOCIETY. 19X 



nity and scorn. Twenty years ago, or thereabout, George 

 McDufSe, governor of South Carolina, asserted that the slaves 

 of the south were in better circumstances than the workingmen 

 of the north. Whittier, the poet, the son of a New England 

 farmer, thus replied to this sneering declaration : 



" Ho ! fishermen of Marblehead: 



Ho ! Lynn cord wainers, leave your leather, 

 And wear the yoke in kindness made, 



And clank your needful chains together ; 

 Let Lowell mills their thousands yield ; 



Down let the rough Vermonter hasten, 

 Down from the workshop and the field, 



And thank us for the chain we fasten ! 



Slaves in the rugged Yankee land ? 



I tell thee, Carolina, never ! 

 Our rocky hills and iron strand, 



Are free, and shall be free, forever ! 

 The surf shall wear that strand away. 



The granite hills to dust shall moulder, 

 Ere slavery's hateful yoke shall lay 



Unbroken on a Yankee's shoulder !" 



There ought not to be a man here, or anywhere else in New 

 England, unpossessed of the spirit of these lines. Where, 

 whichever way you turn, you behold so many monuments of no- 

 ble industry, so many spectacles of busy, beneficent toil, and 

 hear so many sounds of laborious wheels, so many notes of 

 human activity, it should be counted a shame, a reproach, if a 

 man be not imbued with this respect for unenslaved, indepen- 

 dent industry ; or, if he himself is a workiugman, if he have not 

 the will to dignify his vocation, or the good sense to show that 

 he is proud of it. 



There are those, perhaps, who, under the burdens of poverty, 

 or in the weariness occasioned by over-work, complain of their 

 lot, and wish that they might live, as they think many do, with- 

 out turning a hand, or giving shape to a thought. If you know 

 any of this class, you can aay this of them, that they have begun 

 life wrong, in not making themselves superior to all outward 

 things; and that the hardship of their condition consists chiefly 

 in their discontentedness, and in their disposition to murmur 

 and repine. A brave and hopeful man can never be put down. 

 Whatever his lot, he magnifies and glorifies his employment, and 

 works and strives towards the ideal of his mind, with confi- 



