272 f Assembly 



ing machinery — listening to the explanations which are offered of 

 the work; marking with admiration, what others have been able to 

 accomplish; feeling a living incubation, a mind stirring within them- 

 selves, conscious of thoughts and powers which they never knew be- 

 fore; awakening in the determination to test their own ability in con- 

 trivance and opening their eyes to the fact, that they too, are sculptors, 

 and architects, and machinists. Thus you are nurturing your future 

 Fultons and Fitches; while many another boy may whittle out a 

 block with his knife, and feel that he is a Powers; or paint with 

 the tail of his mother's cat, and realize that he is also a West. You 

 have there the beautiful cameos of a struggling youth, whose talents, 

 yet unencouraged and unnoticed, sprang into being in making wood 

 cuts at a school at a country village. And it is by your fostering 

 care, and approving smile, that such secret energies are to be brought 

 forth, and your country is to have sons for universal exhibition, in 

 whose names she will glory; and over whose masterpieces of art, and 

 beauty, and profit, the world shall bend in lasting admiration. Now 

 all this is a work and an end entirely collateral with Christianity. 

 And while we cannot but feel, that upon such endeavors to improve 

 the condition, exalt the nature, and dignity the peaceful employments 

 of man, the smile and the blessing of his Creator, must rest, we 

 must also acknowledge it a work, in which the Christian teacher 

 may justly unite, and through which, as one of its agencies. Christi- 

 anity itself will prosper and triumph. 



But this moral dignity of labor is also purely an American scheme 

 and thought. It has marked our country's history, from the earliest 

 periods of its colonial establishment; not more arising from the first 

 struggling condition of its original settlers, than from the very prin- 

 ciples with which they emigrated; and upon which they determined 

 to erect the empire which they founded. It is undoubtedly true that 

 labor was at first the necessity of their being. Hands and arms that 

 had never toiled before, were required to toil unceasingly upon the 

 rugged shores which were selected as their future home. And in 

 this very fact, a dignity was given to human industry, which had 

 never before been connected with it in modern times. The Win 

 throps, and Johnsons, and Endicotts of that day, would have dignified 

 any station in life. And when they were seen, hewing out their fu- 

 ture independence from the wilderness, and rearing their partial but 

 honorable subsistence from a sterile and unwilling soil, never had 

 the axe glittered with such light, or the plough moved with such 

 majesty before. It is the character of the man which marks the 

 standard of the employment in which he is engaged. But no place 



