of our nature designed it should be, is pampered to a monstrous growth. Man was made for employment, made to provide for himself, and to enjoy what he has the more for its. being the fruit of his industry; and that constitution of society only is in accordance with the constitution of individual man, in which each individual has scope for the exercise of his powers, and is stimulated to a wholesome activity. Society is not yet so constituted in the old world; though by successive changes it is continually approximating towards such a constitution. Meanwhile the old contempt for labor remains, acting and re-acting between the two great classes into which society is divided, the mere consumers despising the producers, and the producers therefore despising themselves, the unproductive consumers blessing themselves as the favorites of heaven, and the producers, on the other hand, envying the consumers and ever learning to hate them.

In our own country, different sorts of labor are of course held in different degrees of honor. Those employments which require high intellectual and moral qualifications, cannot but be regarded among us as more honorable than mere muscular drudgery; for it is naturally presumed that the man is furnished with those personal qualities which are necessary in his employment. Still, with us, no sort of honest labor is dishonorable. Our country has thousands of legislators and magistrates who cultivate their own acres with their own hands, and who think none the less of themselves on that account, and are none the less thought of by their fellow citizens. But under other systems, the different kinds of labor, instead of being more or less honorable, are only more or less dishonorable. Where the highest class is supposed to find its honor and its felicity in doing nothing, there the necessity of earning one's bread in order to eat it, is a dishonor, a mark of inferiority; and each particular kind of labor is higher or lower on the scale of respectability, not in proportion to the demand which it makes for a higher or lower order of qualifications, but in proportion as it brings men nearer to the level, and secures for them the patronage or the deference, of the unlaboring aristocracy. Even in the middle ages the man of science or of letters, the physician, the learned clerk, the skilful artizan, could command from peer and king something of the respect due to intellectual and personal superiority, but still the superiority of knowledge and of virtue, was as nothing before the great

ness of hereditary wealth and power. As civilization advances, the aristocratic class becomes more educated, and seeks to ally itself more closely with the intellectual class. - Thus the dignity of idleness is placed side by side with the dignity of intellectual power, till by degrees men begin to see the difference. And while idleness is thus insensibly losing its exclusive honors, industry itself begins to be delivered from its reproach; for knowledge is continually spreading wider and lower among the laboring classes; and political power is passing, sometimes by gradual reform, and anon by the convulsive shock of revolution, from the few to the many. But ages must yet elapse before the effects of the old order of things shall be effaced from the manners and from the opinions and feelings of the whole people.

I have not forgotten that there are causes at work in our own country, to degrade the true nobility of labor. I have not forgotten the ambition of some to import the ideas and to ape the habits of European life. This however, though aided by the constant circulation of English "tales of fashionable life," and of other things in the same style, can have but little efficacy in counteracting the tendency of the great facts of our condition. The fact that here the cultivators of the soil are the lords of the soil, will stand in spite of Blackwood's Magazine and Bulwer's novels, and in spite of the endeavors of here and there a rich man to make himself unhappy by living in the state and pomp of aristocratic laziness. And so in spite of all such influences, the fact will stand, that here all political power is in the hands of those who live by industry; and that other fact that the few who can live without labor are too few and too scattered to constitute a class, and that of them not one in five is willing to live without some active and useful employment. Nor have I forgotten that, by a mournful anomaly in the political organization of some portions of our country-an anomaly contradictory of all the principles and tendencies of the American civilization-labor is, in those localities, dishonorable; and if I were compelled to believe that such an anomaly will be permanent upon the American soil, outliving or subduing the various influences with which it is at war, I never should have thought of speculating, but with shame, upon the probable character and functions of American literature. That anomaly must pass away; or all that brightens and adorns this land with the promise of a new era of freedom

for mankind, must perish before it, and society itself must be constructed upon other principles than those which are now recognized as its foundation,-yes, upon principles more preposterous than monarchy, and more barbarous than feudalism. The American structure of society must predominate here to the exclusion of every hostile element, or its very foundations must be subverted. The soil of freedom must be cultivated by the hands of freemen, or the time will come when from each traditionary hill, and from each sacred battle field, the voices of the guardian genii, will be heard in tones of grief, "Let us depart." Where is the man, calling himself an American, who does not in his heart believe that this dark anomaly will pass away; and that the time will come, when no spot in our vast union shall be profaned by a fettered step, or by the stroke of an unwilling hand, but every where jocund labor shall look up to heaven in the conscious nobleness of perfect freedom.

The feudal sentiment of honor, has had great influence on the literature of Europe from the romantic ages to this hour. Ancient literature bears no trace of such a sentiment. The sense of right and wrong, the love of reputation, and a quick sensitiveness to the good or ill esteem of others, are common to mankind, and are most developed where human nature is most elevated by intellectual and moral culture; but the feudal sentiment of honor, which tinges all modern literature, is something different from these. What is called the law of honor, is the most distinct and tangible manifestation of the feudal sentiment which has produced it. You could not make Cicero, or Cæsar, or Brutus, or Mark Antony, or the heroic Scipio understand the law of honor, even in its first principles-you could not make Pericles, or Epaminondas, with his "two immortal daughters," or Achilles iracundus et acer, understand it-any more than you could make Moses or Abraham understand it. It is a code made not for men as men, nor for men as citizens, nor for men as fathers, husbands, brothers, neighbors, friends; it is a code for gentlemen only, for men of birth, men of a certain feudal rank; if peasants or mechanics undertake to apply it, they only make themselves objects of ridicule. The sentiment of honor, as embodied in the law of honor, is not simply the feeling which revolts from doing what the wise and the good disapprove; a man may be covered thick with vices, he may be a drunkard, he may be a gambler, he may be a

brawler in the streets, and the disturber of a congregation met for peaceful worship, he may abuse the wife of his bosom, he may be the seducer and betrayer of female innocence, he may be a murderer, and still be a flourishing specimen of the sentiment of honor; for none of these things prove him to be a churl, a peasant, a base mechanic, -none of them are inconsistent with his gentle birth and nurture. The sentiment of honor, as embodied in the law of honor, is not simply the fierce impulse of revenge for injuries, of injuries as such it takes no direct cognizance; it is the state of mind which feels a particular sort of insult from a particular sort of insulter, with a morbid sensitiveness, and which seeks to wipe away that insult not by mere vengeance, but by vengeance obtained through a particular process a process the absurdity of which, as estimated by any rule of reason, or by any unsophisticated human feeling, is beyond expression. This is feudal honor, an arbitrary conventional sentiment appropriated to a particular highbred class, and which the peasantry, the vulgar, have no right to be acquainted with. Such a sentiment could not have originated under any system but that of the middle ages; it cannot be perpetuated in a community, where all are politically equal, and where all the institutions of society tend to make the man more honorable than the gentleman.

You need not tell me that the law of honor reigns with a bloody sway in some parts of our country. I know it; and every man knows that if you inclose in lines upon the map of the United States, that region where the code of honor is recognised, you enclose just that region in which American institutions and American principles have not yet done their work. I mean nothing which ought to offend any man's honest sensibilities; for where are we to look for the true operation, the demonstrated tendency of the American structure of society? In one part of the country, this peculiar structure of society, built on the theory of equal rights, has existed without material change for more than two centuries. In another part of the country, the present order of things, so far as it is the same, dates no farther back, at the farthest, than the Declaration of Independence, and began even then amid embarrassments and counteracting influences which have not yet been removed. Where shall we look to ascertain the real tendency of the American civilization? At Plymouth? Or at Pensacola? I do not say that the man

of Pensacola is to be blamed, or the man of Plymouth to be lauded, for the difference. They stand at two different points, on the broad stream of history. Travel over all those parts of the country, where the counties are divided into towns, and the towns into school districts, each town and each school district managing its own affairs; and where the soil, meted out into farms, is cultivated by the hands of its possessors; and where the votes that determine who shall be selectmen, and who shall go to Congress, and who shall be governor, are deposited in the ballot boxes by the hard huge hands of those who till the ground or strike at the anvil-in this organization you will see the American order of things. Tell me whether the law of feudal honor can be anything but a perishing exotic, under such insti

tutions.

For these sentiments, then, which originated in the feudal structure of society, and which give a peculiar coloring to all the literature of Europe, there will ultimately be no place in the American character, and therefore there will be no place for them in the literature of the American people, when once it shall have been formed in harmony with that character and shall re-act upon it for salutary ends. In this country, above all others, "the age of chivalry is gone;" and the age of the people has succeeded, the age of utility and justice, of common rights and common sense. Literature, among us, must speak with a different tone from that which she learned at feudal courts and tournaments, or she will ever seem to speak with an ungraceful, because outlandish accent.

It is still more obvious that our literature whenever it shall meet our actual sentiments and wants as a people, must be rich in the illustration of certain civic and social virtues, for which there was but little scope under the now antiquated institutions of Europe. To explain what I mean by this position, let me just name to you some of the virtues which are essential to the well-working of such institutions as ours, and which may naturally be looked for under such institutions, but which are hardly expected to exist in other forms of society.

Patriotism, then, is the most obvious of these virtues, not the mere sentiment of attachment to one's native soil, but the intelligent and hearty love of country, prompting to thought and effort for the country's welfare. This is the