Tumultuous horror brooded o'er her van, Warsaw's last champion, from her height surveyed, "O Heaven!" he cried, "my bleeding country save! By that dread name, we wave the sword on high, He said, and on the rampart heights arrayed In vain, alas! in vain, ye gallant few! Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear, Closed her bright eye, and curbed her high career; Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell, And Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell! -Thomas Campbell. NOTES.-Kosciusko (b. 1746, d. 1817), a celebrated Polish patriot, who had served in the American Revolution, was be sieged at Warsaw, in 1794, by a large force of Russians, Prussians, and Austrians. After the siege was raised, he marched against a force of Russians much larger than his own, and was defeated. He was himself severely wounded and captured. Sarmatia is the ancient name for a region of Europe which embraced Poland, but was of greater extent. CXIV. LABOR. Horace Greeley, 1811-1872, perhaps the most famous editor of America, was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, of poor parents. His boyhood was passed in farm labor, in attending the common school, and in reading every book on which he could lay his hands. His reading was mostly done by the light of pine knots. At fifteen he entered a printing office in Vermont, became the best workman in the office, and continued to improve every opportunity for study. At the age of twenty he appeared in New York City, poorly clothed, and almost destitute of money. He worked at his trade for a year or two, and then set up printing for himself. For several years he was not successful, but struggled on, performing an immense amount of work as an editor. In 1841 he established the "New York Tribune," which soon became one of the most successful and influential papers in the country. In 1848 he was elected to Congress, but remained but a short time. In 1872 he was a candidate for the Presidency, was defeated, and died a few days afterward. Mr. Greeley is a rare example of what may be accomplished by honesty and unflinching industry. Besides the vast amount which he wrote for the newspapers, he published several books; the best known of which is "The American Conflict." EVERY child should be trained to dexterity in some useful branch of productive industry, not in order that he shall certainly follow that pursuit, but that he may at all events be able to do so in case he shall fail in the more intellectual or artificial calling which he may prefer to it. Let him seek to be a doctor, lawyer, preacher, poet, if he will; but let him not stake his all on success in that pursuit, but have a second line to fall back upon if driven from his first. Let him be so reared and trained that he may enter, if he will, upon some intellectual calling in the sustaining consciousness that he need not debase himself, nor do violence to his convictions, in order to achieve 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. 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. |