or spread yourself throughout your estate. But because of
the dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no
cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself.
For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and
credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited
or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue,
cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be
answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure
motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the
knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains
yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you
shall have the Power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to
the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give
and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price,--and if that
price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and
that it is impossible to get any thing without its price,--is not less
sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the
laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I
cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those
processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle
on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule,
which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the
history of a state,--do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom
named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for
truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a
rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime,
and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals
in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.
You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track,
you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some
damning circumstance always transpires. The laws