THE dignity of labour! Consider its achievements! Dismayed by no difficulty, shrinking from no exertion, exhausted by no struggle, ever eager for renewed efforts in its persevering promotion of human happiness, "clamorous Labour knocks with its hundred hands at the golden gate of the morning," obtaining each day, through succeeding centuries, fresh benefactions for the world!
Labour clears the forest, and drains the morass, and makes the wilderness rejoice and blossom as the rose. Labour drives the plough, and scatters the seed, and reaps the harvest, and grinds the corn, and converts it into bread, the staff of life. Labour, tending the pastures and sweeping the waters, as well as cultivating the soil, provides with daily sustenance the thousand millions of the family of man.
Labour moulds the brick, and splits the slate, and quarries the stone, and shapes the column, and rears, not only the humble cottage, but the gorgeous palace, the tapering spire, and the stately dome.
Labour, diving deep into the solid earth, brings up its long- hidden stores of coal, to feed ten thousand furnaces, and in millions of habitations to defy the winter"s cold. Labour explores the rich veins of deeply-buried rocks, extracting the gold, the silver, the copper, and the tin. Labour smelts the iron, and moulds it into a thousand shapes for use and ornament, -from the massive pillar to the tiniest needle, from the ponderous anchor to the wire-gauze, from the mighty fly- wheel of the steam-engine to the polished purse-ring or the glittering bead.
Labour hews down the gnarled oak, and shapes the timber,and builds the ship, and guides it over the deep, plunging through the billows and wrestling with the tempest, to bear to our shores the produce of every clime. Labour brings us Indian rice and American cotton; African ivory and Greenland oil; fruits from the sunny South and furs from the frozen North; tea from the East and sugar from the West; -carrying, in exchange, to every land the products of British industry and British skill. Labour, by the universally spread ramifications of trade, distributes its own treasures from country to country, from city to city, from house to house, conveying to the doors of all, the necessaries and luxuries of life; and, by the pulsations①of an untrammelled commerce,the great social system.
maintaining healthy life in
Labour, fusing opaque particles of rock,② produces transparent glass, which it moulds and polishes, and combines so wondrously, that sight is restored to the blind; while worlds, before invisible from distance, are brought so near as to be weighed and measured with unerring exactness; and atoms, which had escaped all detection from their minuteness, reveal a world of wonder and beauty in themselves.
Labour, possessing a secret far more important than the philosopher"s stone, transmutes the most worthless substances into the most precious; and, placing in the crucible of its potent chemistry the putrid refuse of the sea and the land,③extracts fragrant essences,and healing medicines, and
materials of priceless importance in the arts.
