HENEY WARD BEECHER'S HOME TRUTHS.

Tuapeka Times, Volume VI, Issue 297, 9 October 1873, Page 7

HENEY WARD BEECHER'S HOME TRUTHS.

Men do not like manual labor because, in the order of forces, the worker ranks below the thinker. There is a perverted form of the democratic instinct in our time. Everybody says, "I am as good as the next man. lam just as good a man as any other in this k town. All men are free and equal." I beg your pardon; all men are not free, in the first place, in point of fact ; and certainly all men are not equal. They ar9 not equal in height, nor in weight, nor in productive capacity, nor in virtue, nor in courage, nor in any other of the qualities which go to make up manhood. " What, then ; do you repudiate that maxim V Yes, in this scope I do. If you say every man has a right *o his freedom, I accept that. If you believe that all men are equal before the law, that is 10. A true law is one which makes no distinction of class or rank, and has the same commands and penalties for men of all classes from the top to the bottom. In that sense men are equal severally before the law. But men are not equal in capacity any more than in size, in another sense. And when a man says, "lamas good as the next man," it may be so. But when the universal man says, " I am as good as anybody else," it is a lie. There are infinite gradations among men in this respect. Now, there is a natural law in this matter. Men are ranked according to the part of their brain which is the most productive. The grand blunder of the Commune and the International theories consists in the supposition that men can be made to stand on the same level,- whom Grod did not make of the same force j and that all men have precisely the same remuneration who do not contribute the same quantities to society ; and that the same, values attach to manual work which attach to other work ; that the things which are produced by the bottom of the brain should bring as much as those which are produced by the top. The fact is that the products of the bottom of the brain are cheapest — that is, the most productive part of mankind is the animal part ; and the more productive a thing is, the cheaper its products are. As you go up towards the artistically | spiritual, the products of the mind have a higher value, whether you measure them by moral force, and by the impiessious which they produce upon men, or by their rarity, an 4 consequent marketable value. A man shears sheep. There are five hundred men in this township who can do the same work. The wool, when once it is sheared, is sent to be manufactured — scoured, cleaned, dyed, spun. It is to be woven into a fabric ; but there are not five hundred men who can weave that wool into an exquisite piece of cloth. The man who can do it has something in him finer than the man who can simply shear. He has more skill. He has more educated faculties. He has more experience, which is only another name for education. Why, then, is the wool in the form of clotH of so much more value than the wool before it is woven into cloth 1 Why is the man who weaves paid more than the man who shears 1 Hie man that shears is paid a dollar a day, and the man who knows how to weave gets his two and three dollars a day. What makes the difference in their remuneration 1 It is occasioned by the difference between the part of the brain which one sells. The man who sells work with but little thought in it gets a low price, and the man who sells work with a great deal of thought in it, and fine thought at that, gets a higher price. Now and then a man, however, who has worked all his life long in the store, in the shop, in the tallow-chandler's factory, or on shipboard says, " I have always been a hard worker, and I have got something together, and I am going to give my boy advantages which I never had, and make a lawyer or a doctor or a minister out of him." The impression is that if you can put a boy into this groove or that, the groove carries honor. It is supposed that the position will do more for him than he can do for himself. It is presumed that, if a man goes into a liberal profession, he will be a liberal, large, fertile man. This is a f*lse idea, and one which has proved to be a curse to many and many a young man. For, as soon as it is found that there is a pigmy in the profession, ho is dropped out of it. There are live hundred thousand blossoms on one apple-tree, and perhaps three hundred of them bear fruit. All the rest drop and go down to the ground, and are good for nothing except for show and beauty. And do you notice how it is with that big tree of law 1 It blossoms all over every year with candidates. There are a multitude of abortive blossoms, and only here and there one bears fruit. You know how it is with the liberal professions. Young men go into them because they are considered honorable ; but there are comparatively few that ■ stay in them. Men think that the honor belongs to the profession ; but the moment they begin to exert themselves \ in its affairs many of them prove to be a sham, and fail, and drop down to the bottom. Men aie measured by what they do. If a man has force, he shows it by the result which he pro duces. The amount of it — whether it is small or great ; and the character of it — whether it is high or low— »these things, are also shown by those results.

And there is no such thing as cheating in this master. You cannot use your lower brain and rank with men who use their higher. Thisk is a la\v— not of men, but of God. ' Moreover, men are reluctant to woi k with tlipir hands, because they gee that wealth is achieved faster, and in larger measure, in other ways. Men- are far more anxious to be rich than they are to be good or popular. They say, " You may preach as much as you have a mind to against riches, but I think you yourself would be willing to «be rich. I never heard a minister deride wealth who objected to taking a big salary. I have heard ministers warn people against money ; but they never seemed to be afraid of getting it them* selves." All this may be perfectly true ; but it only goes to show that ministers are like anybody else. Men are of "like passions, " as the apostle said. They are alike in their persons. They are apt to be just as foolish one as another ; just as selfish; just as easily tempted by wealth ; just as liable to make mistakes and to .reap the penalties of those mistakes. Sudden wealth, and great wealth, are ; the expectation of thousands' of men who leave the farm or the shop in the country, and throng to the city. The result of these false ideas is reluctance on the part of men to work at manual labor, patiently earning comparatively little, and living as they go along by the development of their manhood and of themselves through their work. These notions produce an unfortunate state of things. They direct actentiod more and more to the easy acquisition of -wealth ; and as society grows more populous, there are multitudes who are begging employment in our cities, for whom there is very little employment. Why, between the seasons of business, I suppose there are thousands of young men — I do not know but five thousand — from twenty to thirty years of age, who have nothing to do, New York is full of them. I do not speak with disrespect of them. I merely say that here are one, two, three, four, five, ten thousand young men thronged together in New York ; and I say to them, "Can you do a day's work on a farm ?" "No," they say ; "I never learned that." "Are you good on shipboard ?" "No ; I have never been at Sea ; I could not stand that." "Can you work the loom?" "No." "Can you make a shoe ?" "No." "Do you know anything about blacksmithing ?" "No." "Can you make a chair ?" "No." "Are you good as a tailor ?" "No, sir." "Can you lath and plaster?" ,"No." "Can you build a house?" "No." "Is there anything on God's earth that you can make?" "No; not a thing." "What can you do, then ?" "Well; I have been brought up to book-keeping— to merchandising." That is a respectable business. Ido not deride "it. I do not blame a yonng man for going into business. Neither do I blame him — though I pity him— when business is slack, and he is high and dry, because he has been brought up to that class of labour of which there ia a superfluity, and has learned nothing else, can do nothing else, Men and brethren, there are not enough young men so brought up that they know how to work. I feel the intimate connection which there is between working and morality. I feel the substantial sinfulness of men who live indolent and useless lives. I honour men of the shop. I honor men cf the soil. I honor men of the sea. And I say to young men's parents, "It is a shame to bring up boys and girls without teaching their hands how to earn themselves bread ! I do not care if you are worth a million dollars, your child ought, to know how to work as well as anybody else's child. Your boy may yet beg his bread, though to-day you can enable him to walk in royal apparel. It is a shame not to bring up a girl to know how to work for a living. It is a shame for a girl to be ashamed to work for her living. It is a shame for a young woman not to be willing to be a chambermaid, or washerwoman, a cook, or anything else that is honest, by which her livelihood may be gained, Every young man should know how to use his hands; how to make his head inventive , how to apply himself so as to gain a living honestly.