Weekly North Carolina Standard

TRUE SOCIAL DIGNITY. To be ashamed of their origin is, just now, in American Society, the weakness of the little minds that compose it. The man who rides in his carriage shrinks from the acknowledgment that the money which enabled him to buy that carriage was earned by his father, dollar by dollar, with toil and patience, in a tan yard, behind the counter of a shoemaker's or tailor's shop, or by honest industry in some other useful occupation, below (so called) the grade of the merchant or professional man; as if the man did not honor the work, and not the work the man.

To such let Daniel Webster speak. Hear him:―

"It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin, raised among the snow drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that when the smoke first rose from its rude chimney, and curled over the frozen hill, there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach them the hardships endured by the generations that have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the narrations and incidents, which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode. I weep to think that none of those who inhabited it are now among the living; and if ever I fail in affectionate veneration for him who raised it against savage violence and destruction, cherished all domestic virtues beneath its roof, and through the fire and blood of a seven years' revolutionary war, shrunk from no toil, no sacrifice, to serve his country, and raise his children to a condition better than his own, may my name and the name of my posterity, be blotted forever from the memory of mankind."

And we will add, that he who is ashamed of the poor father and mother, whose honest labor supported him in childhood, and whose daily toil was taxed to give him the education by which he has been enabled to rise to a condition above the one they occupied, is unworthy to be the associate of wise and good men. All such will despise him; and no matter how loftily he may carry his head, he is nothing in the estimation of America's true noblemen.

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