success therein, since he can live and thrive in another (if you choose, humbler) vocation, if driven from that of his choice. This buttress to integrity, this assurance of selfrespect, is to be found in a universal training to efficiency in Productive Labor.

The world is full of misdirection and waste; but all the calamities and losses endured by mankind through frost, drought, blight, hail, fires, earthquakes, inundations, are as nothing to those habitually suffered by them through human idleness and inefficiency, mainly caused (or excused) by lack of industrial training. It is quite within the truth to estimate that one tenth of our people, in the average, are habitually idle because (as they say) they can find no employment. They look for work where it can not be had. They seem to be, or they are, unable to do such as abundantly confronts and solicits them. Suppose these to average but one million able-bodied persons, and that their work is worth but one dollar each per day; our loss by involuntary idleness can not be less than $300,000,000 per annum. I judge that it is actually $500,000,000. Many who stand waiting to be hired could earn from two to five dollars per day had they been properly trained to work. "There is plenty of room higher up," said Daniel Webster, in response to an inquiry as to the prospects of a young man just entering upon the practice of law; and there is never a dearth of employment for men or women of signal capacity or skill. In this city, ten thousand women are always doing needlework for less than fifty cents per day, finding themselves; yet twice their number of capable, skillful seamstresses could find steady employment and good living in wealthy families at not less than one dollar per day over and above board and lodging. He who is a good blacksmith, a fair millwright, a tolerable wagon maker, and can chop timber, make fence, and manage a small farm if required, is always sure of work and fair recompense; while he or she who can keep books or teach music fairly,

but knows how to do nothing else, is in constant danger of falling into involuntary idleness and consequent beggary. It is a broad, general truth, that no boy was ever yet inured to daily, systematic, productive labor in field or shop throughout the latter half of his minority, who did not prove a useful man, and was not able to find work whenever he wished it.

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Yet to the ample and constant employment of a whole community one prerequisite is indispensable, that a variety of pursuits shall have been created or naturalized therein. A people who have but a single source of profit are uniformly poor, not because that vocation is necessarily ill-chosen, but because no single calling can employ and reward the varied capacities of male and female, old and young, robust and feeble. Thus a lumbering or fishing region with us is apt to have a large proportion of needy inhabitants; and the same is true of a region exclusively devoted to cotton growing or gold mining. A diversity of pursuits is indispensable to general activity and enduring prosperity.

Sixty or seventy years ago, what was then the District, and is now the State, of Maine, was a proverb in New England for the poverty of its people, mainly because they were so largely engaged in timber cutting. The great grain-growing, wheat-exporting districts of the Russian empire have a poor and rude people for a like reason. Thus the industry of Massachusetts is immensely more productive per head than that of North Carolina, or even that of Indiana, as it will cease to be whenever manufactures shall have been diffused over our whole country, as they must and will be. In Massachusetts half the women and nearly half the children add by their daily labor to the aggregate of realized wealth; in North Carolina and in Indiana little wealth is produced save by the labor of men, including boys of fifteen or upward. When this disparity shall have ceased, its consequence will also disappear.

CXV. THE LAST DAYS OF HERCULANEUM.

Edwin Atherstone, 1788-1872, was born at Nottingham, England, and became known to the literary world chiefly through two poems, "The Last Days of Herculaneum " and "The Fall of Nineveh." Both poems are written in blank verse, and are remarkable for their splendor of diction and their great descriptive power. Atherstone is compared to Thomson, whom he resembles somewhat in style.

THERE was a man,

A Roman soldier, for some daring deed

That trespassed on the laws, in dungeon low
Chained down. His was a noble spirit, rough,
But generous, and brave, and kind.

He had a son; it was a rosy boy,

A little faithful copy of his sire,

In face and gesture. From infancy, the child
Had been his father's solace and his care.

Every sport

The father shared and heightened. But at length,
The rigorous law had grasped him, and condemned
To fetters and to darkness.

The captive's lot,

He felt in all its bitterness: the walls

Of his deep dungeon answered many a sigh

And heart-heaved groan. His tale was known, and touched

His jailer with compassion; and the boy,

Thenceforth a frequent visitor, beguiled

His father's lingering hours, and brought a balm

With his loved presence, that in every wound
Dropped healing. But, in this terrific hour,
He was a poisoned arrow in the breast
Where he had been a cure.