their
keep, rear children, educate them, and send them out to be of some
service to the State; what does the dweller in cities do more than
these? If I were disposed to argue the question, I should contend that
the man who gets a bushel of corn or a sack of good potatoes out of the
land has added a more real asset to the wealth of the community, and
therefore deserves more praise from the commonwealth, than all the
tribe of stockbrokers since the world began; for these lords of wealth,
who reign supreme in cities, produce nothing. But since my friend is
fond of quoting Browning, I also will quote him, and let the poet say
in the flash of three lines what the dialectician would need a page to
say:

All service ranks the same with God,--
God's puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first,

Of course there is no disputing the general truth of the statement that
nations are developed by the call made upon their energies by
difficulty, and their power of response to that call. But why should
such a statement be construed into a reproach on my mode of life? If
my friend, who is probably sitting in a comfortable office at this
moment, adding up figures which he could do almost with his eyes shut,
would condescend to visit my potato patch, he would find call enough
upon his energy. I have almost broken my back, and certainly blistered
my hands, for the last four hours in hoeing my potato trenches into
good level lines, and I have still an hour's work at weeding to do
before I can satisfy myself that I have earned my dinner. I can assure
him that bread-fruit does not grow on my land, nor am I in danger of
being corrupted by a too easy means of subsistence. The worst crime
that can be alleged against me is that I have changed my occupation in
life, but I am very far from being unoccupied. The occupation which I
now follow is the most ancient and most honourable in the world; I
believe that Adam followed it. Is it not a curious irony upon
civilisation, that it has so filled the mind with artificial estimates
of work, that a form of work which is still practised by the great
majority of the world's inhabitants is scarcely regarded as work at all
by the insolent minority of mankind who happen to live in cities? But
I have long observed that there is a universal tendency in men only to
regard as work the peculiar sort of work which they themselves do; and
so the artisan supposes he is the only ge