IIQ SAGADAHOC COUNTY SOCIETY. 



mineral kingdoms, the raw materials for the gratification of all our 

 wants, but she has not given us metals and minerals wrought into 

 forms for use, she has not given us shelter, food, raiment, and arti- 

 cles of necessity and luxury, all prepared for our enjoyment. The 

 tax she imposes to prepare them for use is labor. She has provided 

 nothing that will satisfy the wants of civilized or savage life with- 

 out labor. She yields nothing to idleness, and has therefore pro- 

 vided for no drones in her system. They are interlopers, excres- 

 ences on her plan of human economy, living on the industry of 

 others and fill no place in that economy. Labor is Nature's uni- 

 versal law ; it is a condition of existence which must be obeyed by 

 all who live in harmony with her laws. It is an ordinance of God 

 himself, dignified and made honorable by the divine judgment and 

 the divine will, and he who shirks from it and escapes his just share 

 of the world's toil, throwing it upon others, practically sets the 

 will of his Maker at defiance, and creates disorder and discord in 

 human society. I do not intend to convey the idea that the amount 

 of physical labor now performed by the nations called civilized, will 

 be necessary or desirable in the highest condition of the human 

 race. We are living in an age of labor, emphatically a mammon 

 worshipping age. Wealth, luxury and useless show are the great 

 objects of desire and the leading ideas of the age through which 

 the nations most highly civilized are now passing. A large portion 

 of the world's labor is now employed in providing superfluities and 

 luxuries which a more civilized people, in some future age, will 

 dispense with, and the valuable time now consumed on them, be 

 put to better and higher uses. People and nations rise from bar- 

 barism by successive steps, as a child rises in his education, from 

 the alphabet through all the stages of advancement to the ripest 

 scholarship. This exclusively material age will surely, in its turn, 

 draw to a close, and an era of higher moral and social development 

 dawn upon man. The coming ages will exhibit a people of few 

 and simple material wants, of generous and noble character, refined, 

 of high intellectual and moral attainments, and whose lives will be 

 in continual harmony witli the laws of their being. The human 

 race will then come nearer filling tlie position for which it was de- 

 signed, and to which it is slowly advancing. When this higher 

 civilization comes — as come it surely will — human toil will be 

 lighter, more equally divided, and its performance made a pleasure. 

 With the pursuits of the farmer more especially can be mihgled 

 the highest pleasure and profit. With an enlarged and elevated 



