keeps it would summarily expel me for my lack of euphemism. As a
general rule, everybody is above his business, and thinks manual labor
mean, and only fit for emigrants.

It is said that our mechanics are nearly all foreigners, and that an
American apprentice is an extinct species, like the cave bear or the
dodo. Farmers' sons prefer any way of getting their bread to working
with their hands. The pedler's caste ranks higher than the manly
independence of the plough. A country store is an object of ambition,
where the only toil is to deal out a glass of wretched tipple to the
village sots who haunt those castles of indolence to drink, to smoke,
and to twaddle over stale village news. Some young fellows solicit
subscriptions for maps or for great American works, or drum for fruit
nurseries, patent clothes-wringers, or baby-jumpers. Others aspire to
enter the religious mendicant orders of America as paid brethren. They
are too proud to work, but not ashamed to beg. Beg is perhaps a hard
word; but solicitation is begging when the solicitor personally profits
by it.

The sons of trading fathers despise the old tiresome roads to wealth of
their class. Ledgers and law-books are too slow. All are in search of
the short cut to fortune. They believe in the philosopher's stone as
implicitly as the alchemists; they seek for it as earnestly. It is a
jewel that will last forever, but its composition varies with each
generation.

We of the press get scores of letters from young men, who spread out
therein what they imagine to be their qualifications and
accomplishments,--and plenty of them, for self-satisfaction is really
the first law of Nature. Then follow their hopes and wishes and askings
for advice, which, stripped of the flimsy rhetorical wrappers they feel
obliged to use in deference to the old prejudice in favor of steady
industry, come simply to this: "What is the minimum of work on which a
clever creature like myself can live? And what kind of work is the least
irksome and the most respectable?"

My colleague Tarbox, justly celebrated as a local reporter, belongs to
the earnest school, and wishes me to take high ground, and write a
sermon on the holiness and dignity of labor. He is always ready with his
_laborare est orare_, and has by heart a passage from a German
professor, who, writing of the manners of the Romans in an epoch of
their history not unlike this of ours, says: "When a man works merely in
order to attain