Indiana State Sentinel

The Pleasures and Advantages of Labor.

There is a very false notion in the world respecting employment. Thousands imagine if they could live in idleness they would be perfectly happy. This is a great mistake. Every industrious man and woman knows that nothing is so tiresome as being unemployed. During some seasons of the year we have holidays, and it is pleasing on these occasions to see the operative enjoy himself; but we have generally found that, after two or three days of recreation, the diligent mechanic or laborer, becomes quite unhappy. Often he sighs over the wretchedness of being idle. The fact is, we are born to labor, and our health, comfort, and happiness depend upon exertion. Whether we look at our bodies or examine our minds, everything tells us that our creator intended we should be active. Hands, feet, eyes, and mental powers, show that we were born to be busy. If we had been made to be idle, a very large portion of our bodily and mental faculties would be redundant. Sir Charles Bell exhibited the wonderful structure of the human hand, other physiologists have entered into a minute description of our bodies generally, and have displayed their wonderful adaptation for the business of life. Metaphysicians, also, have dilated on mind and its operations, and have brought forth to view its marvellous powers, demonstrating that man was intended to be lord of this lower creation. But then all depends upon labor. There are the same mind and body in the savage that haunts the wilderness-the gourmand that merely eats, drinks, and sleeps—the lady that lounges on a sofa, and boasts that she never did anything, nor even wet her fingers—and the myriads of active hands and hearts that change the desert into a paradise, and furnish it with all the comforts, enjoyments, and luxuries of life. Industry and toil make all the difference between the useless and the useful. If the world consist of ladies, we should be starved, famished, and poisoned; or did it contain none but gentlemen unfit for manual labor, we must all perish for want of the common necessaries of life. A world of kings, lords, Alexanders, Caesars, Caligulas, or Jezebels, would soon have the globe without an inhabitant. Exertion, activity, study and toil, all properly directed to some useful end, are the great requisites of every age and country. Give us these, and we can soon have a happy, a prosperous, an enlightened and a refined era.