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Homeric times. Now any quarter part of that man's work puts most men's whole work to shame. The laborers that plant Mr. Gladstone's fields and reap his harvests work less hours a day, work less constantly, work less exhaustingly than he, their employer.

But I may safely appeal to you. Which do you find hardest to apply yourselves wholly to a lesson in logic, in chemical physics, in chemistry, in algebra, for three hours, or to do manual labor in the hayfield for the same length of time ?

The truth is, everybody who is worthy to live works. It is the necessity of most, it is the pleasure of many others. There are a few worthless people who do not work; but, taken altogether, it is a working world. This is true for rich as for poor. Our Governor has ample means to retire on. So had our late Senator. But they work, earnestly, continuously, laboriously. If you keep your hired man to a late dinner he thinks himself misused. We altogether keep the Governor of the State so busy he often cannot leave his office for dinner at all. He accepts work as a business. Some others endure work as a means to their monthly wages.

When I say work I mean work. I mean the drudgery part of it. It is toil in every department. It is so even in the fine arts.

Cowper says playfully

"But when a poet takes the pen,
Far more alive than other men,
He feels a gentle tingling come
Down to his fingers and his thumb."

But there is the endless correction, condensation, chastening of the style The sculptor must work over and over the plastic clay; the officer of State must superintend, at least, a wearisome correspondence, and take charge of a deal of routine work. The professor that plans the labor, hampered by insufficient team-work, by varying amount of help, and burdened with responsibility for results, does as taxing and wearisome a service, to say the least, as he who, without a care save to do well, works his three hours, under the simple conditions of doing as he is told. There is an old story of a man doomed to the perpetual filling of a barrel that had no bottom. So the officer that corrects exercises and compositions lifts from its place one bundle of such papers after another, but never has been lucky enough to find the bottom of his box. Rest is the promise of the future,-the dream of heaven. On earth all things labor.

It is wise to accept this lot, and not repine; to mingle with it cheerfulness of spirit, vigor and intelligence in its management, and nobleness in its aim. There is a way to turn work into play.

Is there not, then, a distinction between labor as honorable and dishonorable?

Truly there is, and ought to be. But it does not always happen that a popular distinction is a right one. It was a sense of honor that sustained so long the barbarous practice of dueling. He who declined a challenge was hooted from society. And yet this sentiment was the fruit of a true principle, that a man should prefer character to personal safety. To neglect to vindicate honor out of fear of personal harm, was to be a coward, unworthy the association of gentlemen.

So here it may be that whatever dishonor attaches to manual labor really has reference to something else than the hard work. If so, perhaps, as in the

case of dueling, public sentiment may be righted,-may attach the honor to what is worthy of it, and to that alone.

Let us see. Sir Isaac Newton enjoyed in his lifetime a fame almost matchless in the world. But he did manual labor. He ground his lenses, he constructed his dials and his pendulums, and measured out the substances for his numberless experiments. This was hard manual labor, and with honor. I do not know the personal habits of Sir Humphrey Davy, Liebig, and other chemists, but I know they must have put their hands to hard work, for theirs was a kind that could not be delegated to others.

Work, then, is neither honorable nor base. Put mind into it, and however it may seem to be drudgery, the work becomes intellectual, high, and honored. Manual labor is only in low esteem because of its associations in the public mind. These associations are ignorance and rudeness. The farmer's business stands low amongst the occupations of life for these real or supposed marks of it.

Now it is our business who see this not to join in the cry against it, but to point out and enforce proper distinctions as to what is reputable and base. The English painter was asked what he mixed his colors with to render his paintings so rich. He is said to have said, "With brains, sir." Anything mixed with that precious oil will shine. Mechi mingles his farm work with brains, and delights the world with high farming. Ville of Paris fertilizes the royal farm at Vincennes with the same, and new revelations of vegetable science grow out of his fields, to the profit of all mankind.

I cannot exactly say that the dignity of labor depends on the amount of brains mingled with it. It rather depends on what is the ideal of it in the common mind. If this ideal is high the calling ranks high. The ideal soldier is one whose courage is his very nature,-whose disinterestedness has sunk self entirely out of sight. He is the defender of his country's honor, regardless of danger and self-interest. The ideal pictures him as self-possessed, skillful, full of ready knowledge, energetic, and of the high and courteous bearing of a gentleman. We might, perhaps, have to read our Middle Ages history to find out how this ideal of a soldier came to pervade the world, but it does. Therefore the soldier's is an honored name in spite of the murderous and demoralizing nature of his trade.

There are many poor lawyers and incompetent physicians. Yet are those callings honored because the ideal in the common mind is high. To be a physician, what does it mean but to be a scholar; to have deeper insight into the mysteries of nature than other men; to be ready to help every sufferer to the utmost, without regard to compensation or exposure to danger. So the lawyer stands high. The ideal is high. Clergymen stand high in most countries. They stand differently in different lands, according to the general reputation they bear. It is the duty of men of every class to help elevate the standard of excellence of their own class,-to keep the ideal high.

Now here is a place in which the intelligent farmer, the honest manual laborer, may be of service. As true gentlemen, as refined, as intelligent, as noble-hearted, as worthy every way of respect, are to be found amongst farmers as can be found in any class. But the ideal of this calling, as it exists, in the public mind, is far below what these men deserve to have it. The popular ideal does not keep pace with the foremost of any class. It goes with the majority. It lags behind with the mass. Now then, if the mass of farmers work more from routine than from intelligence; if they are narrow in their

views, their sympathies, and lack cultivation, the ideal formed of the calling will conform to this general character. All the worthy ones who deserve honor in the calling will secure it only through a breaking down, in respect to them individually, of a deep-seated prejudice.

The name of scholar is an honored one. I mean the name in its lowest sense of one who is learning from teachers and books. It means, in the public estimation, disregard of personal ease, industry, severe mental application, docility, and daily accession of mental property and skill. I pray you, help keep up this ideal. Help also to raise the ideal of what manual labor is, by doing with equal earnestness, faithfulness, and intelligence any three hours' work assigned you, or that you ever anywhere undertake to do. Be a help to that worthy and growing minority that in this task of discriminating honored from despised work have undertaken to carry forward a banner marked Excelsior! There is abundant need of it. It is the farmers themselves who, by thinking meanly of their calling, teach the world to rate it low. "Only a farmer," is heard oftener from farmers than from others. It is not at fair time, or at grange picnics that it is heard, but when it comes to business,-when they talk of their sons; regarding education and social standing and influence.

But there is another distinction between one labor and another. As labor mixed with brains is more noble than routine, unthinking work, so it matters what kind of heart is put into it. The end, the aim, the moral purpose has to do with its nobility. Labor to satisfy a strictly personal need is not wrong in itself. It may take all a man's energies to feed and clothe himself. But every step away from selfish considerations is a step upward. Work for one's family, for a dependent mother, for a sick neighbor,-work that has heart mingled in it,-is ennobled.

I take it we sometimes misinterpret the curse of the earth in Adam's fall. We think the soil was rendered barren, the climate fickle and unpropitious. We think weeds were then given a power to supplant corn and potatoes; that somehow, but for the curse, the fields would have grown spontaneously and without care the most useful products. "Deceitful poison would die out, and the costliest balsam spring up in every neighborhood."*

But it is not so. The curse changed neither soil nor climate. The inherent depravity of pursley and couch grass and Canada thistle was the same before as after the fall. According to the Bible, labor was instituted in paradise when "The Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it." According to Milton, when the morning meal of Adam and Eve was over, and prayers said, "On to their morning's rural work they haste." It was man's business to supplant wild forests by verdurous fields; to clothe desolate places with trees; to develop the apple from the crab; and to fit the potato, the peach, the grains and grapes of earth for man's use.

But the difference between labor in the second chapter of Genesis and in the third is this: Labor with sin is hopeless-is drudgery. The lack of moral aims that is the curse of labor-turns it from a blessing into toil. And the sin of communities, of nations, of the world, that misuses labor, that makes the results of it uncertain through oppression and war, this is the world's curse of labor. The curse of the fall was figuratively in plant and soil: it was really, but no less truly, in the soul. It was a diseased will.

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Now then we have found another mixture, even better than brains, to mingle with work. It is heart-life. This ennobles work.

See how little men care for simple exertion, however hard and wearisome. The game of ball is not an easy, indolent thing. It tasks the physical frame to the utmost-it exhausts. But it is play, and not work, because the heart is in it.

Men strain every nerve in the chase and in races on land and water. I have no doubt that many students who have part in the college regattas put an energy and perseverance and anxiety into their training for it which their lessons never get, just because the useful lesson is a task and the comparatively useless contest is their play.

So war, so the pursuit of wealth, so fame, so ambition, have their votaries, who, from pure delight in their employment, count no labor or privation a hardship. They have mingled heart-life with their manual labor, and rejoice in it. Love turns toil to play. A half-dozen miles of walk after a hard day's work may be a toilsome task to a young man; and again, there may be an attraction at the journey's end that makes the last steps the freshest of all.

Practicing on the pianoforte is usually a dull, repugnant task. But I knew a student at the University in this State. He went before tea to the instrument to play. In the late twilight I passed his room on my way to a party. The man had forgotten the time in absorbed interest in his practice. I returned towards midnight, and there, in the dark, liquid notes were dropping at his touch, enchanting the silence of the night.

It is so with intellectual effort. You, perhaps, find geometry a task. Suppose you delighted in it. Blaze Pascal is one of the very eminent names in French philosophy and theology. It is said of him, that his father did not want to have him study the sciences, but language and literature. The boy at twelve had, in his chamber, without books or instruction, simply from his delight in drawing and reflecting on geometric figures, gone through the equivalent of thirty propositions of Euclid. Was it work to him, or play?

To return, then, to manual labor. The same law holds. The ball game, the chase, war, is manual labor. Intelligence dignifies it. High aims dignify it still more; while delight in the aims lifts it from toil to pleasure, from work to play.

Here is our honored neighbor, the father of two graduates of our college. When he undertook to reclaim from its savage condition the huge cornfield that now adorns the road near his house, he was expostulated with. "You will never be repaid for this great labor. Why need you, in your old age, take such a work in hand ?" "Yes, I shall be paid," he answered, "if in nothing more, just in looking at it." It was an answer that does honor to him. It shows that the same unselfish delight in beauty that we look to see in youth before its struggles with the cares of life, is fresh in the heart of him who has traveled so far on the dusty path of life that the milestone of his golden wedding lacks but a few weeks to be reached. Shame be to him who would mar the pleasure of this aged friend to the college and father of graduates, by pilfering the fruits that make his simple luxuries!

I had no thoughts, until I reached this stage of my address, of dealing particularly with our own field. There are some features of our college labor system here, however, some mixed conditions in our labor that give rise to a few thoughts.

Man likes to work under his own guidance. He likes to feel that "this i

my way." The young man especially cries out to his father, "Give me the portion of goods that belongs to me." Here at college, however, the labor is planned for the student, not by him; and executed under the foreman's or professor's direction. This detracts a little from the interest you feel in it. Then, it is not your own. You cannot turn to the fields you adorn, the crops you raise, and say proudly, "These are mine!" This is another drawback to your interest. Again, three hours only go to work, against three times three to study. It is the old rule, to that that hath shall be given. The study that possesses nine hours steal away the thought and interests from the weaker three.

Let me, then, recount to you some of the possessions you have already in this field of manual labor:

1st. In the first place it is your college. Perhaps in some respects you do not like it, but in the main you do like it, and are proud of it. It is in a peculiar manner the property of the students. We all turn with pride from the early photographs, which exhibit stumps and rail fences about the very doors of the college and boarding hall, to the beautiful expanse of the college park, and the level, well shaped, even fields of our farm, and say, "This is students' work." Other colleges show libraries, pictures, in-door cabinets of specimens, to their visitors. We show roads, fences, stock, fields, crops, plants, shrubs, barns, chemical analyses, greenhouses, records of observations. And we exhibit them to numbers far greater than visit other colleges. What a glory it would be to every owner of the college-and who are so much its owners as its students?—if the examiner could say as he looked at each bit of road, at each planting or weeding or hoeing, at each length of fence or square of harvesting, "This is the best of its kind." This shows the intelligence and heart,-invention to plan, skill to execute, and abhorrence of imperfection.

The graduate of a few years ago, returning, is glad at heart to see improvements everywhere. He loves the spot where he studied so long. He remembers with some pride that he helped to lay out that field, to build this wall, to drain this spot, and clear that lot. What possibilities of improvement are ours! The park may be a paradise of trees, transplanted from our forests or imported from abroad; the lawns the perfection of an out-of-door carpet; its gardens a museum of all choicest and rarest plants, and all under such irrigation as to breathe the freshness of beauty, regardless of parching winds and pitiless skies. The farm shall show whatever of evenness and richness of crops a thorough drainage, judicious enrichment, and perfect tillage can create. Its experiments shall fix the attention of the thoughtful; its barns and stock and implements be models for the delight and instruction of all. We would be glad to manage the labor so that each stroke go its weight towards the fulfillment of this prophecy. We would have every student feel that the results of his work are more his own than any one's, and feel a deep interest in understanding the plans of work, and contributing his mite, daily, towards their accomplishment.

2d. Again, this labor belongs to you as a means of education and skill. Perfect skill in agriculture cannot, of course, be given in a four-years' course. The lawyer, or physician, or civil engineer, as he comes from the schools, a graduate, has yet much to learn. So here. Four years, with but three hours' work a day, distributed among stock, crops, orchards, grounds, cannot make you perfect in any work. So neither does your laboratory practice, although very extensive compared with that required in other colleges, make you a per

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