Ko. 244.] 273 



or work can permanently exalt a man who is in himself unworthy 

 of the reverence which his calling may demand. 



I knew one of the most dignified, learned and elegant of the last 

 generation of the sons of Connecticut, who exercised an unlimited 

 hospitality, in a retired residence, upon exceedingly limited means; 

 who, for want of other hands to do the work, himself habitually 

 €leaned the shoes of his guests after they had retired to rest. And 

 when remonstrated with upon the indignity to which he thus subject- 

 ed himself, he simply and happily replied, "It is my only way to 

 wash the disciples' feet " No station could exalt such a man; and 

 boot-blacking, in his hands, rose to a dignity, which in this country, 

 luxurious idleness, though charioted in wealth can never command. 



I knew a venerable son of the Revolution, who, in the professional 

 studies of his early manhood, when in midwinter foreign invasion 

 had driven a widowed mother, robbed and in poverty, from the sea- 

 board town, several miles to an interior village, harnessed himself to 

 a sled, that he might drag her on the Sabbath back to the church in 

 whose communion she desired to unite- In the spirit which was 

 thus cultivated, an honor was affixed to labor, and in the general 

 feeling of the people, there was transmitted a moral dignity as con- 

 nected with industry, even in the very lowest shapes, in which the 

 needs of man required it; a dignity which, I rejoice to say, has re- 

 mained an American principle, and which the present generation of 

 our countrymen seems determined to perpetuate. The extreme differ- 

 ence between this general feeling, and the whole moral condition 

 of the eastern continent, is a very remarkable fact. Throughout 

 monarchical Europe, (an epithet indeed, which seems now almost 

 an epitaph,) the permanent distinctions of castes and classes make 

 labor disreputable, and give no encouragement to the general en- 

 largement of the human mind, or to the innate ambition of indi- 

 vidual thought. Agriculture is in the hands of a peasantry, (a title 

 which I trust, American farmers will never agree to bear;) a peas- 

 antry who must live and die in the rude hamlet in which they were 

 born; whose ignorance must never be enlightened beyond the clumsy 

 implements of culture which their forefathers have used; who must 

 feel themselves marked and distinguished, as the mere tolerated deni- 

 zens of a soil which can never be their own; whose fare is of the 

 coarsest and meanest provision which can sustain the life of man, 

 and the average wages of whose labor is, in Austria, less than one 

 seventh, in France less than one third, and even in England, less than 

 one half of the average of agricultural wages among the freemen of 



[Assembly, No. 244.] S 



