The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 6, December 1863 | Page 2

mite to human knowledge. Here is one, painfully toiling through the tangled depths of a desert continent, to find a highway for commerce or Christianity. Here is another, in the lonely seas around the pole, where the ghostly ice-mountains go drifting through the gray mists, patiently wrestling with the awful powers of nature, to snatch its secret from the hoary deep, and bring it home in triumph. Hard fisted, big boned, tough brained, and stout hearted, scared at nothing, beaten back by no resistance, baffled, for long, by no obstacle, this race works as though the world were only one vast workshop, and they wanted all the tools and all the materials, and were anxious to monopolize the work of the world.
They are workers primarily, makers, producers, builders. Labor is their appointed business as a people. Sometimes they have to fight, when fools stand in their way, or traitors oppose their endeavors. They have had to do, indeed, their fair share of fighting. Things go so awry in this world that a patient worker is often called to drop his tools, square himself, and knock down some idiot who insists on bothering him. And this race of ours has therefore often, patient as it is, flamed out into occasional leonine wrath. It really does not like fighting. That performance interferes with its proper business. It takes to the ploughshare more kindly than to the sabre, and likes to manage a steam engine better than a six-gun battery. But if imbeciles and scoundrels will get in its way, and will mar its pet labors, then, heaven help them! The patient blood blazes into lava, fire, the big muscles strain over the black cannon, the brawny arm guides the fire-belching tower of iron on the sea, and, when these people do fight, they fight, like the Titans when they warred with Jove, with a roar that shakes the spheres. They go at that as they do at everything. They fight to clear this confusion up, to settle it once for all, so it will stay settled, that they may go to their work again in peace. Fond of a clean job, they insist on making a clean job of their fighting, if they have to fight at all.
'But, after all, this race of ours is selfish,' you say. 'It works only for itself, and you are making something grand and heroic out of that. If it civilizes, it civilizes for itself. If it builds cities, drains marshes, redeems jungles, explores rivers, builds railroads, and prints newspapers, it is doing all for its own pocket.' Well, we say, why not? Is the laborer not worthy of his hire? Do you expect a patient, toiling people to conquer a waste continent here, for God and man, and get nothing for it from either? A people never yet did a good stroke of work in this world without getting a fair day's wages for the job. The old two-fisted Romans, in their day, did a good deal of hard work in the way of road and bridge building, and the like of that, across the sea, and did it well, and they got paid for it by several centuries of mastery over Europe. We rather think, high as the pay was, and little as the late Romans seem to have deserved it, it was, on the whole, a profitable bargain for Europe. The truth is, our race has, like all other great creating races, been building wiser than it knew. It is not necessary that such a race should be conscious of its mission. In its own intention it may work for itself. By the guiding of the Great Master, it does work for all humanity and all time. If a race comes on the earth mere fighters, brigands, and thieves, living by force, fraud, and oppression, even then it serves a purpose. It destroys something that needs destroying. In its own turn, however, it must perish. But an honest race, that undertakes to earn its honest living on the earth, and in the main does earn it, honestly and industriously, by planting and building, like our own, never works merely for itself. It plants and builds to stand forever. The results of patient toil never perish. They are so much clear gain to humanity.
To many, the conscious end of the existence of the Yankee nation may have been a small affair indeed. That end is only what they make it. Its unconscious end is, however, another matter. That end God has made. To one man, the nation exists that he may make wooden clocks and sell them. To another, the chief end of the nation's existence is that he may get a good crop of wheat to market during rising quotations. To another, that