The disposition and the ability to labor are both the result of
education; and why should the uneducated be better able to labor than to
read Greek and Latin? Surely only that there are more teachers in one
department than in the others; but a good teacher of labor may be as
uncommon as a good teacher of Latin or Greek. There is a false, vicious,
unmanly pride, which leads our youth of both sexes to shun labor; and
it is the business of the true teacher to extirpate this growth of a
diseased civilization. And we could have no faith in this school, if it
were not a school of industry as well as of morality,--a school in which
the divine law of labor is to be observed equally with the laws of men.
Industry is near to all the virtues. In this era every branch of labor
is an art, and sometimes it is necessary for the laborer to be both an
artist and a scientific person. How great, then, the misfortune of
those, whether rich or poor, who are uninstructed in the business of
life! We should hardly know what judgment to pass upon a man of wealth
who should entirely neglect the education of his children in schools;
but the common indifference to industrial learning is not less
reprehensible. Labor should be systematic; not constant, indeed, but
always to be reckoned as the great business of life, never to be
avoided, never to cease.
Labor gives us a better knowledge of the fulness, magnificence and
glory, of the divine blessing of creation.
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