is perfectly compatible. But how is it, when that pursuit becomes an eager and absorbing strife for fortune? What is the language of fact and experience? Amidst such engrossing pursuits, is there any time for reading? Are any literary habits, or any habits of mental culture, formed? I suppose those questions carry with them their own answer. But the over-busy man, though he is neglecting his mind now, means to repair that error by and by. That is the great mistake of all. He will not find the habits he wants all prepared and ready for him, like that pleasant mansion of repose to which he is looking. He will find habits there, indeed; but they will be the habits he has been cultivating for twenty years, not those he has been neglecting. The truth he will then find to be, that he does not love to read or study, that he never did love it, and that he probably never will love it.

I do not say that reading is the only means of mental cultivation. Business itself may invigorate, enlarge, and elevate the mind. But then it must be, because large views are taken of it; because the mind travels beyond the counter and the desk, and studies the geography, politics, and social tendencies of the world; investigates the laws of trade, and the philosophy of mechanism, and speculates upon the morals and ends of all business. Nay, and the trader and the craftsman, if he would duly cultivate his mind, must, like the lawyer, physician, and clergyman, travel beyond the province of his own profession, and bring the contributions of every region of thought, to build himself up in the strength and manhood of his intellectual nature.

And therefore I say with double force of asseveration, that he who has pursued business in such a way as to have neglected all just mental culture, has sacrificed the end to the means. He has gained money, and lost knowledge; he has gained splendour, and lost accomplishment; gained tinsel, and lost gold; gained an estate, and lost an empire; gained the world, and lost his soul.

And thus it is with all the ends of accumulation. The beneficent use, the moral elevation, which every high-minded man will propose to himself, are sacrificed in the eagerness of the pursuit. A man may give, and give liberally; but this may be a very different thing from using property beneficently and wisely. I confess, that on this account I look with exceeding distrust upon all our city charities; because men have no time to look into the cases and questions that are presented to them; because they give recklessly, without system or concert. I believe that immense streams of charity are annually flowing around us, which tend only to deepen the channels of poverty and misery. He who gives money to save time, cannot bo acting wisely for others; and he who does good only by agents and almoners, cannot be acting wisely for himself. And yet this is the course to which excessive devotion to gain must lead. The man has no time to think for himself; and therefore, custom must be his law; or his clergyman, perhaps, is his conscience. Ile is an excellent disciple in the school of implicit submission. Ile attends a sound divine; he gives bountifully to the missions or to the almshouses; he suffers himself to be assessed, perhaps, in the one tenth of his income; and there end with him all the uses and responsibilities of wealth. His mind is engrossed with acquisition to that extent, that he has no proper regard to the ends of acquisition. Nay more, he comes, perhaps, to that pass in fatuity, that

he substitutes altogether the means for the end, and embraces his possessions with the insane grasp of the miser.

On the whole, and in fine, this passion for a fortune diverts man from his true dignity, his true function-which lies in exertion, in labour.

I can conceive of reasons why I might lawfully, and even earnestly, desire a fortune. If I could fill some fair palace, itself a work of art, with the productions of lofty genius; if I could be the friend and helper of humble worth; if I could mark out where failing health or adverse fortune pressed it hard, and soften or stay the bitter hours that are hastening it to madness or to the grave; if I could stand between the oppressor and his prey, and bid the fetter and the dungeon give up its victim; if I could build up great institutes of learning and academies of art; if I could open fountains of knowledge for the people, and conduct its streams in the right channels; if I could do better for the poor than to bestow alms upon them-even to think of them, and devise plans for their elevation in knowledge and virtue, instead of for ever opening the old reservoirs and resources for their improvidence; if, in fine, wealth could be to me the handmaid of exertion, facilitating effort, and giving success to endeavour, then might I lawfully, and yet warily and modestly, desire it. But if wealth is to do nothing for me but to minister ease and indulgence, and to place my children in the same bad school, I fearlessly say, though it be in face of the world's dread laugh, that I do not see why I should desire it, and that I do not desire it!

Are my reasons asked for this strange decision? Another, in part, shall give them for me. "Two men," says a quaint writer, "two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn craftsman, that with earth-made implement, laboriously conquers the earth, and makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard hand-crooked, coarse; wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the sceptre of this planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face, all weathertanned, besoiled with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a man, living man-like. Oh, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed. Thou wert our conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles, wert so marred. For in thee, too, lay a God-created form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacement of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; thou art in thy duty, be out of it who may; thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for daily bread.

"A second man I honour, and still more highly; him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the bread of life. Is not he, too, in his duty; endeavouring towards inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his outward and his inward endeavour are one; when we can name him artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, that with heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return,

that he have light and guidance, freedom, immortality?-These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow where it listeth.

"Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities. united; and he, that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this world know I nothing, than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere be met with. Such an one will take thee back to Nazareth itself; thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great darkness.”*

And who, I ask, is that third man, that challenges our respect? Say that the world were made to be the couch of his repose, and the hea vens to curtain it. Grant that the revolving earth were his rolling chariot, and all earth's magnificence were the drapery that hung around his gorgeous rest; yet could not that august voluptuary-let alone the puny idler of our city streets-win from a wise man one sentiment of respect. What is there glorious in the world, that is not the product of labour, either of the body, or of the mind? What is history, but its record? What are the treasures of genius and art, but its work? What are cultivated fields, but its toil? The busy marts, the rising cities, the enriched empires of the world-what are they, but the great treasure-houses of labour? The pyramids of Egypt, the castles, and towers, and temples of Europe, the buried cities of Mexico-what are they but tracks, all round the world, of the mighty footsteps of labour? Antiquity had not been without it. Without it, there were no memory of the past; without it, there were no hopes for the future.

Let then labour, the world's great ordinance, take its proper place in the world. Let idleness, too, have the meed that it deserves. Honour, I say, be paid wherever it is due. Honour, if you please, to unchallenged indolence-for that which all the world admires hath, no doubt, some ground for it: honour, then, to undisturbed, unchallenged indolence-for it reposes on treasures that labour sometime gained and gathered. It is the effigy of a man, upon a splendid mausoleumsomebody built that mausoleum-somebody put that dead image there. Honour to him that does nothing, and yet does not starve; he hath his significance still; he is a standing proof that somebody has worked.

Nay, rather let us say, honour to the worker-to the toiler-to him who produces, and not alone consumes-to him who puts forth his hand to add to the treasure-heap of human comforts, and not alone to take away! Honour to him who goes forth amidst the struggling elements to fight his battle, and shrinks not, with cowardly effeminacy, behind pillows of ease! Honour to the strong muscle and the manly nerve, and the resolute and brave heart! Honour to the sweaty brow, and to the toiling brain! Honour to the great and beautiful offices of humanity to manhood's toil and woman's task-to parental industry, to maternal watching and weariness-to teaching wisdom and patient learning to the brow of care that presides over the state, and to many; handed labour that toils in the workshops and fields, beneath its sacred and guardian sway!

Thomas Carlyle.

ON THE MORAL LIMITS OF ACCUMULATION.

PROVERBS XXX. 8, 9: "Give me neither poverty nor riches; lest I be full and deny thee, and say, who is the Lord? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain."

In my last discourse, I considered some of the evil consequences of the passion for accumulation; in the present, I propose to point out some of the moral limits to be set to that passion. In other words, the limits to accumulation, the wholesome restraints upon the passion for it, which are prescribed by feelings of general philanthropy and justice, by the laws of morality, and by a sober consideration of the natural effects of wealth upon ourselves, our children, and the world—these are the topics of our present meditation.

I cannot help feeling here, the difficulties under which the pulpit labours in the discussion of the points now before us. Some, indeed, will think them unsuitable to the pulpit, as not being sufficiently religious. Others seem to be disposed to limit the pulpit to the utterance of general and unquestionable truths. To these views I cannot assent. The points which I am discussing are, in the highest degree, moral; they are practically religious; they belong to the morality and religion of daily life. And then again, as to what the preacher shall say, I do not think that he is to be confined to truisms, or to self-evident truths, or to truths in which all shall agree. We come here to deliberate on great questions of morality and duty; to consider what is true, what is right. In doing this, the preacher may bring forward views in which some of his hearers cannot agree with him; how, indeed, should it be otherwise. But he does not pretend to utter infallible sentences. He may be wrong. But he is none the less bound to utter what he does believe, and thinks to be worthy of attention. This office I attempt to discharge among you. And I ask you not to take ill, at my hands, that which you would not so take, if I uttered it by your firesides. And if I am wrong, on some such occasion perhaps you will set me right.

Let me proceed, then, frankly to lay before you some reflections that have impressed my own mind, in regard to the limitations which good feeling, justice, and wisdom, ought perhaps, to set to the pursuit of wealth.

In the first place, then, I doubt whether this immense accumulation in a few hands, while the rest of the world is comparatively poor, does not imply an unequal, an unfair distribution of the rewards of industry. I may be wrong on this point; and if I were considered as speaking with any authority from the pulpit, I should not make the suggestion:

yet speaking as I do, with no assumption, but with the modesty of doubt, I shall venture to submit this point to your consideration.

It would seem to be an evident principle of humanity and justice, that property and the means of comfort should bear some proportion to men's industry. Now we know that they do not. I am not denying that, in general, the hard-working man labours less with the mind; and that he is often kept poor, either by improvidence and wastefulness, or because he has less energy and sagacity, than others bring into the business of life. I do not advocate any absurd system of agrarian levelling. I believe that wealth was designed to accumulate in certain hands, to a certain extent; because I perceive that this naturally results from the superior talents and efforts of certain individuals. But I cannot help thinking, that the disproportion is greater than it ought to be.

In order to bring this question home to your apprehension, let me ask you to suppose that, some years ago, any one of you had come to this city with a beloved brother, to prepare for a life of business. Let me suppose that you had been placed with a merchant, and he with a carman: both lawful, useful, and necessary callings in society: somebody must discharge each of these offices. Now you know that the results would probably be, that you would be rich, or at least possessed of an easy property, and that he would be poor; or, at any rate, that you would have a fair chance of acquiring a fortune from your industry, and that he would have no such chance from his industry. Now let me further suppose, that you did not treat him as some men treat their poor relations; passing them by and striving to forget them-almost wishing they did not exist; but that you continued on terms of kind and intimate intercourse with him; that you constantly interchanged visits with him, and could compare the splendour of your dwelling with the poverty of his: I ask you, if you would not feel, if you could help feeling, that society had dealt unjustly with you and with him in this matter? But I say that every man is your brother; and that what you would thus feel for your brother, you are bound to feel for every man!

I know that it is said, in regard to accumulation in general, that capital has its claims; but I cannot help thinking that they are overrated, in comparison with the claims of human nerves and sinews. Suppose that of a thousand men engaged in a great manufacturing establishment, ten possess the capital and oversee the establisment, and the nine hundred and ninety do the work. Can it be right, that the ten should grow to immense wealth, and that the nine hundred and ninety should be for ever poor? I admit that something is to be allowed for the risk taken by the capitalist. I have heard it pleaded, indeed, that he is extremely liable to fail, and often does so-while the poor, heaven help them! never fail. But it seems to me that this consideration is not quite fairly pleaded. It is said that there is a risk. But does not the capitalist, to a certain extent, make the risk? Is not his risk often in proportion to the urgency with which he pushes the business of accumulation, and to that neglect and infidelity of his agents and workmen, which must spring from their having so slight a common interest with him in his undertakings? The risks will be smaller, when the pursuit of property is more restrained and reasonable, and when the rewards of industry are more equal and just. But I