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allies. Destined of God to be joined together, they have not only been kept asunder, but foully forced into most revolting unions. "But from the beginning it was not so;" neither shall it be so in the end. The vile, coerced alliances of both are henceforth to be dissolved, and hearts long severed to be blent in one. You have heard occasionally of those cases of romance in real life in which parties between whom there has subsisted from childhood a pure affection, and whose hearts have been naturally bound by plighted vows, have nevertheless from some disparity of family connection, or to favor some ambitious project of the friends on one or both sides, been discountenanced in their cherished affinities, and finally, after the ineffectual employment upon them of every possible inducement to gain their consent, have been compelled, literally forced, to wed others whom they could never love. Long and dismal years of silent agony, of living death, ensue, during which they are widely separated, perhaps never hearing from each other. The last hope of realizing the golden dreams of youth is relinquished, and they resign them to their fate. By a wonderful concurrence of events however their respective consorts die contemporaneously, and then, in advanced life, yet with the fires of first love still glowing in their faithful breasts, they arise to seek each other's embrace. Seas may separate them; different hemispheres may hold them; but they traverse continents and oceans, they rest not till they meet, the sorrow-wasted remnants of themselves, to mingle their true hearts together. Such is the melancholy story of Liberty and Labor. God gave them to each other. Man has torn them asunder. Governments have sanctioned the separation. They have been forced into positions of mutual antagonism and horrible strife. But for a quarter of a century Liberty and Labor have been partially freed from their hated connections, and have been seeking each other, and now they have met! They have met,--LIBERTY AND LABOR! Not however, as the comparison might indicate, wayworn and grief-worn, not haggard and withered and trembling on the verge of dissolution. They meet, if we may be allowed to change the figure, as meet the streams from the western mountains, and the river from the northern lakes, the one having rushed from rock to rock, and the other from vale to vale, and both having gathered fresh strength from a thousand obstacles, to pour with a shout and a shock their tireless floods in one mighty tide, the glory of a hemisphere and the

highway of the commercial world. Such will Liberty and Labor united be, the glory of the new world, and the renova tion of the old.

Before passing to the details of our theme, suffer us to call your attention to the fact that the great ultimate inquiry of all those utilitarian inquiries which are now exciting the public mind, is by what means shall labor be redeemed from its condition of abject drudgery, and placed "but a little lower than the learned professions, if not upon a level with them? We cannot step out into the awakening world without meeting this great inquiry in some form or other struggling for solution. Our township, county, and state fairs, our industrial conventions and associations, our mechanical institutes, our artisan's processions, our national printer's conventions, our agricultural papers, and last, not least our manual labor schools and colleges are indices pointing to the same central question, how shall labor be ennobled?

We cannot but regret that some of the most zealous efforts to realize this object have been so egregriously misdirected. We refer particularly to the Associationist movement. The cardinal principle of this scheme is that labor is to be dignified by rendering it attractive, and this is to be effected by changing the word labor, into the phrase attractive industry, by painting the plow-tails, varnishing the hoe-handles, and furbishing the tines of the manure-forks, and especially by pulling down the barns and dwellings and building greater! Now whether this system took its cue from the furbished muskets and glittering bayonets and flashing swords and all the attractive sheer of war, and determined to start a competition by way of imitation, or whether it derived the hint from the navy-yards where old ships are made. attractive by being repainted, and called by new names, we cannot determine. However this may be, we do not at all fancy the project. We regard it in fact as a libel upon labor, and upon man too; upon labor as implying that it is not susceptible of any higher refinement than that of dress, of any deeper polish than that of varnish, and upon man as implying that he cannot be attracted by any more sterling quality of labor than its surface lustre. This attraction-theory is on a plane with the insulting method of elevating woman by calling her lady, and be-decking her person with gorgeous apparel. No tinsel trappings, nor tricks of speech can avail to dignify woman, so long as her actual condition is that of servile degradation or contemptible imbecility.

Labor and Ladies then (another shining alliance by the way) are to be elevated in the same manner, by giving them learning and liberty.

Behold then the sole method of honoring labor-making it free. Establish, as by a decree of the Medes and Persians, the irrepealable alliance of Liberty and Labor. Write it down, proclaim it everywhere. Let learning endorse it, let literature illustrate it, let art emblazon it, let piety and philanthropy magnify it. Unfurl the banner, LIBERTY AND LABOR. Let it float among the free winds, which love to kiss the bronzed cheek of labor. Let it be inscribed on the walls of every farm house, that our children may learn to lisp together the names of LIBERTY AND LABOR. Let it be the watch-cry on every inch of free American soil. Let the sower speak it to the plowman, and the plowman pro-long it to the reaper, and let the reaper mingle with the shout of the harvest-home; Liberty and Labor. Let its thunder-call roll over the slave cursed South, till labor there, crushed, degraded, manacled and brutalized, shall leap up unfettered, and claim its birth right, iberty.

I propose now to show that Liberty and Labor have a joint mission that liberty cannot accomplish its high aims without labor, and that labor cannot fulfill its noble destiny without liberty. Let us brush from our minds those cobweb notions of sentimental liberty which our local and itinerant orators have been spinning with spider fertility for half a century, and look at it as sober practical men. What is liberty? It is the free possession and exercise of our minds and our bodies. Had we no minds and no bodies, it is mathematically certain that liberty would be to us a nullity. The same would be true if we had no occasion to exercise mind or body. It is then amid the exercises, that is, the activities and susceptibilities of mind and body, that liberty lives, moves, and has its being. Here is the sphere of its beneficent influence, and whatever it does for man it does within this scope. What now are its aims? The highest develop ment and well being of mind and body. We are speaking of course of the individual aims of liberty. The national aims however are perfectly analogous. The nation is but the aggregate of the individual, and what promotes the true substantial interests of the individual secures the prosperity of the nation. As for government, it is but the machinery which Liberty employs to attain her ends, and to maintain her necessary authority and power. When we define liberty -"the free possession and exercise of our minds and bodies,"

we speak of it subjectively—as a blessing enjoyed. It may be also considered objectively, as the power, the personified principle, the superintending presence by which man is preserved in the unmolested use of his natural and acquired possessions. We shall freely use the word in both these senses-though chiefly in the latter, that is, as the guardian of rights and interests. In this view it will be readily seen that liberty is a plain matter of fact utilitarian principle-allowing, indeed, a holiday now and then, a cattle show, a fair, or a procession, once a year-but decidedly addicted to the graver pursuits of life. Look cautiously here, and you will discover the precise points at which liberty has been turn ed from her appropriate sphere, and her peerless orb of light and blessing been converted into a portentous comet. These tangent points are two. One is the point of junction between the mental and the physical-the other embraces the physical with the mental, but excludes the sterner responsibilities of both. The first we say is the point of junction between the mental and physical-that is, liberty has been confined to the realm of mind, to thinking, feeling, willing &c., and their correlatives, speaking, writing, worshipping the divine Being, acting morally, &c. These high functions of the mind have been consigned to liberty as her honorable charge, while the bodily activities have been deemed too mean to engage her attention. The other case of departure may be thus described. It begins at the point where the amusements, diversions, pomps and displays of life, whether mental or bodily, join with the toils, burdens, and drudgeries of life; and while it assigns the former to liberty, it closes her door against the latter, as too low bred and servile to enter even the vestibule of her temple. The fullest liberty, for example, is vouchsafed upon this principle, to the cultivators of polite literature and profound learning, the Scotts and the Bulwers, the Coleridges and Erasmuses; but he who would Luther like or Lovejoy like, employ his talents in exposing corruptions, in denouncing oppression and proclaiming universal freedom, is no son of Liberty. So in the physical department, by this principle, the inalienable right is guarantied to all white men, to be lazy, to get drunk, to stand at the street corners every hour of the day, and talk state politics or village scandal, to race horses and play cards, to act the gentleman and fight duels, to brandish bowie knives at home, and bayonets in Mexico: all this is respectable, genteel, glorious; but hard labor, with its heraldry of horny palm and sweaty

brow, every day labor, aspiring to nothing higher, but minding its own business, though on its brawny Atlantian shoulders rests the whole race, has been barely tolerated, and that only on condition that it would keep its place, and submit to be yoked to the ox and harnessed with the mule. And labor has meekly bowed to its fate! "Issachar is a strong ass, couching down between two burdens." What a monstrous perversion of Liberty from its legitimate aims, making it the Scourge and curse of man. Let us now see in what consists its restoration to its appropriate sphere. Revert then to the aims of liberty as above defined, viz. the highest developement and well being of mind and body. What this development and well being are, liberty does not determine--this is not her province. It is man's duty, with the light he has, to know these, and knowing them, to choose them, and then it is his right to demand liberty, as the condition of securing these ends. So long as the mass of men are willfully igno rant or regardless of their substantial interests, so long as they contemn sober pursuits, and exalt in their estimation puerile frivolities and "inexplicable dumb show, "so long will liberty be only a license to man to transform himself into a brute or a demon. Let mankind respect the true interests of mind and body-laying sense and folly under ban-and then will they be prepared to restore liberty to her proper sphere. What then are these interests? Interests are the correlatives of wants. Our mental interests are determined by our mental wants, and so of our bodily interests. Knowl edge for example is a want of mind: consequently the acquisition of knowledge is an interest of mind. Good is also a mental want, not only private, but public good; therefore the prosecution of universal good is an interest of mind. On the other hand, health, food, raiment, shelter, are bodily wants; consequently the acquisition of these is a bodily interest.The sphere of liberty then is clear-its province plain, namely, to protect man in the lawful acquisition of his wants.

We are now prepared to point out the relation of liberty to labor. It is an admitted truth that in the acquisition of all the bodily wants, and also of many of the mental, labor— physical labor—is the grand agent. There are numerous instruments, such as brute force, steam power, machinery, and implements likewise, as axes, hoes, spades, plows-but the grand agent is labor. In the vast and complicated machine now in operation over the wide world for supplying human wants, the motive power is intelligent human labor

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