se influences, acting through generations, have been
wrought into the very blood. It is in the stock. Go where you will a
Yankee is a working creature. He is the honeybee of mankind. Only Work
is royal among us. It carries the sceptre, and changes all nations by
its touch, opening its treasures and disclosing its secrets.

But with all this industry, you shall find nowhere on earth so little
_drudging_ work as in the North. It is not the servitude of the hands
to material nature. It is the glorious exercise of mind upon nature.
They vex nature with incessant importunities. They are always prying,
and thinking, and trying.

In California, gold is found in quartz formations. But in New England,
and the free inventive North, in the geology of industry, gold is
found everywhere--in rye straw and bonnets, in leather and stone, in
wool, felts and cloths; in wood, in stone, and in very ice. It is
wrapped up in the beggar's raiment, which unroll in our mills into
paper--yesterday, a beggar's feculent rags; to-day, a newspaper,
conveying the world's daily life into twenty thousand families. And so
great are the achievements of labor that everybody honors it. It
stands among us as an invisible dignity. Four spirits there are that
rule in New England--religion, social virtue, intelligence, and
_work_; and this last takes something from them all, and is their
physical exponent. So that not only is work honored and honorable, but
the want of it is an implied discredit. The presumption is always
against a man who does not labor.

In the South, the very reverse is true, as a general proposition.

It is true, because labor is the peculiar badge of Slavery. It does
not stand, as with us, a symbol of intelligence, but a symbol of
stupid servitude. It is the business of those whom the law puts out of
the pale of society and accounts chattels, and who, by the opinion of
society, are at the bottom, and under the feet of respectable men. To
work is, therefore, _prima facie_ evidence of degradation. It is
ranking oneself with a slave by doing a slave's tasks; as eating a
beggar's crust with him would be a beggar's fellowship.

But this is not the whole reason, nor the chiefest and more potent
reason of the difference between public feeling about WORK, North and
South.

The ideas of men in the South do not inspire any such tendency. Men
are judged there not by what they are and are to be, but by what they
_can now do_. Only such things