pressive as Hogarth's picture of the ruined Rake, simpering in his helpless imbecility at the wreck which he has made?

But this diversity, this combination of tares and wheat, of alloy with the purer metals, is inseparable from our humanity. All along the line, officers and rank and file, are there not in our bravest armies some faint hearts like those of the children of Ephraim, who being harnessed and carrying bows, turned themselves back in the day of battle, who if they made a free and full confession of their feelings would express them in words very similar to his, who sang,

"Should I e'er come back to thee, dear mother,
Never more from thee I'll roam;

But I'll stay, and whack my youngest brother,
In tranquillity at home"?

And so, when we come down the ladder from the highest to the lowest rungs, from the millionaire to the mendicant, from the lords of the forests and the lakes, to the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, from those who pay to those who receive wages, we find the same incongruities.

XI.

THE WORKING MEN.

Two Kinds of Working Men Accurately described - The Dignity and the Happiness of Work - Timoleon d'Ecossais-The Contest between Industry and Indolence Sympathy between Rich and Poor - Lying Prophets who would dissuade from Work-The Smoke Nuisance and Sanitary Laws.

ARE not the working men, as we designate those who receive wages in England, as if there was not mental as well as manual labour (ah, there are times, God knows, when the burdens on the brain seem the cruelest and most crushing of all!), are they not divisible into the conscientious and the compulsory, reliable and evasive? In Scribner's Magazine for July, 1894, and in an article upon "American types of the Working Man," I find two examples, which seem to me to comprehend the whole body, on both sides of the Atlantic, (1) the class of workmen, who respect their work more than their wages, who are loyal to their craft and proud of good work, however humble it may be, who save money, have tidy homes, give their children the best education in their power, and belong distinctly to the law-supporting and not law-upheaving members of society, and (2) the class who take no interest in their work, and are always trying to do as little as they can for their wages.

L

I find no grander specimen of our race than the man who goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening, be his occupation what it may, in dutiful obedience to the Divine instruction, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. I do not read in history of a braver courage, a truer wisdom, or withal of a surer happiness. He lives in loyal obedience to the immutable law, "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread," to that innate instinct which urges the little child to minister to others, and the boy to delight in his boxes of miniature tools and bricks, and in digging with his tiny spade. The wisest of men, who had made experiment of every method which promised happiness, has told us that we must earn it, that there is no harvest

for those who neither plough nor sow. It is good and comely, he writes, for every man, poor or rich, to rejoice in his labour. And all must own the obligation, even those who shirk it, or seek to satisfy themselves with subterfuge, like the great French Duke, who thus addressed the reflection of himself, as he sat before a looking-glass, razor in hand: "Timoleon d'Écossais, God has made you a gentleman, and the Emperor has made you a Duke: nevertheless, it is necessary that thou shouldest have some occupation, and therefore thou shalt shave thyself." Some there are, to whom even this light handiwork is irksome, from the rich man who transfers it to his valet, to the lazy loafer with three days' bristles on his cheeks and chin, the sort of man, of whom it was said, that in all the animal world he and the camel differed most from each other, because the camel

would work six days in the week without drinking, and he would drink, whenever he could, six days in the week without working.

We need not go where men most do congregate, we need not

"Expatiate wide o'er all this field of man,"

to explain these discrepancies; we find them, we men, here within our own waistcoats, and though the accommodation seems somewhat limited for two rivers, a carriage-and-pair, and a deadly combat, we are conscious here in the heart,

"That rivers twain are rushing still,
And pour their mingled flood,

Good in the very midst of ill,
Ill in the heart of good";

that Plato's two horses, of which I spoke, are competing for the mastery, the white horse to draw us onward and upward, and the black down the precipice; and that here we have that law of the members, of which St. Paul wrote to the Romans, warring against the law of the mind. Should not this conviction make us more sympathetic? "If," writes à Kempis, 66 "thou canst not make thyself such as thou wouldest be, how shalt thou expect another to be exactly to thy mind?"

Only that sympathy, which sighs, "Alas, my brother," and not, "Fie on thee, fie on thee, we saw it with our eyes," "Now that he is down, let him rise up no more "; which goes and binds up the wounds, instead of passing by on the other side;

only that love, which constrains us to bear each other's burdens, ten thousand times more powerful than all the acts and edicts of senates and parliaments, of unions and federations, this only when the times are out of joint can reset them and keep the machinery of the world in working order. If one touch of nature makes the whole world kin, how much more one touch of Divine compassion. I have a friend, who is a working man in a foundry at Derby. His son - his only son was crushed to death in his eighteenth year by a mass of iron, which fell accidentally upon him. But pale death, as Horace wrote, visits not only the log-hut (taberna) of the woodman, but the stately palace towers, and when the eldest son of the Prince of Wales died, my friend, the foundryman, wrote thus to our future King

"MY DEAR AFFLICTED PRINCE,

"Amongst the millions that are sympathizing with you and your dear wife in your great trouble, please accept the sympathy of a Derby working man. Having lost my eldest and only son at a moment's notice by a fatal accident a short time since, I can feel deeply for you in your great bereavement. No one but themselves can tell the sorrows of those who have lost their dear ones. I hope that God will give you health and strength to bear up under your great trial, not only for your own sake, but for the sake of your dear wife and family. You must think that your dear son is not lost, but gone before. For on that Easter morning all the graves their dead re