The day
will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the
youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is
a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more
_gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the
hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books,
and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain
white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher
point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is
of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see
boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or
a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing
in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as
buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than
to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who
are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows
how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," knows that
he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty
under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we
must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the
seeming impossible, when it is given us to do.
I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two
years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people
as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these
are not common to each other yet, and never will be.
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