THE MODEL PRODUCTIVE STATE. 



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pendence which has thrown the other parts of the worhl into 

 tlie shade. And on this side of the water the uses of machinery 

 and the separation of the different processes of labor into dis- 

 tinct employments have brought similar results ; and nowhere 

 more apparent than in our own Commonwealth, where the 

 development and expansion of the system has been already 

 expressed by the secretary's abstracts to which I have referred. 

 This lesson 'of the diversity and unity of our industry suggests 

 for our appreciation a just and generous idea of labor. And 

 what is labor ? It is profitable action ; it may be merely manual 

 labor, or it may not be ; it is attention ; it is business ; it is 

 employment. That is labor. Here in Massachusetts are three 

 hundred and fifty thousand males over fifteen years of age, of 

 whom only one-seventh, or fifty thousand, are returned as 

 farmers, and about as many more under the head of laborers. 

 But I pray you not to suppose that all the rest of us are drones 

 in this Northern hive. On the contrary, there is not a class 

 nor an occupation which could be spared from its place in this 

 imperial arch of our social organization. There is no room in 

 the field of modern enterprise and modern philosophy for the 

 obsolete theory of certain political reformers who write down 

 under the title of non-producers all such as do not directly and 

 with their own hands work their food and clothing out of the 

 earth. The returns of Massachusetts furnish a broader and 

 more catholic construction than that. The mechanician, who 

 facilitates or increases the efficiency of the producing capacity 

 of society ; the manufacturer, who furnishes the clothing and 

 conveniences of life with dexterity and cheapness ; the mer- 

 chant and tradesman, who acts tlie part of a time-saving and 

 money-saving agent in the exchange of products and values ; 

 the agents of currency, who enlarge the facilities of the mer- 

 chant through the stages of realizing the returns and equivalents 

 of trade ; the man of inventive thought, who shortens, or 

 cheapens, or eases any of these processes from one occupation 

 to another ; in short, whoever, and under whatsoever name, 

 steps in between these employments of men, and by reducing 

 the time or cost of their interconnection makes himself a link 

 in the chain that binds them all together, — thougli the flesh 

 upon his bones and the raiment upon his back have not come 

 immediately to him from the sweat of his own toil upon the 



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