Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/56

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS cattle, lint, wine, and corn, and that to the full so that we can rear a fine, strong race of men, and as to what we want in our own country we can obtain it elsewhere against our own produce. That we do not hold to this comes from the selfishness that has been introduced among us, and which leads us off from labor to idleness.

And yet to work is noble: it saves from wantonness and vice; it yields good fruit, so that a man can richly nourish his body without care, and without the fear that he sully himself with the blood of the innocent, and live by it. It makes the body, too, hale and strong, dissipates diseases engendered by idleness, and last of all, fruit and increase follow the hand of the worker, as creation itself came from the hand of the all-working God at the beginning, so that, in external things, there is nothing in the universe so like God as the worker.

It is to selfishness we owe it that all our strength and power, which ought to defend our country, are consumed in the service of foreign masters. Behold how unlike we are to our ancestors! These would not suffer foreign masters in their land, but now we lead them in among us by the hand, if they have but money, that some may get hold of the money while many get the stripes. And when a pious man has brought up a well-doing son, then come the captains and steal him away, and he must expose himself to the danger of dying of hunger, disease, murder, shot, or wounds. And if he reckon up his