Watching hour by hour.
’Tis his love which giveth
Blessings great or small;
’Tis his sun which shineth,
Making day for all.
ORATION—The Laboring Classes.
Sir, it is an insult to our laboring classes to compare them to the debased poor of Europe. Why, sir, we of this country do not know what poverty is. We have no poor in this country, in the sense in which that word is used abroad. Every laborer, even the most humble, in the United States, soon becomes a capitalist, and even, if he choose, a proprietor of land; for the West, with all its boundless fertility, is open to him.
How can any one dare compare the mechanic of this land (whose inferiority, in any substantial particular, in intelligence, in virtue, in wealth, to the other classes of our society, I have yet to learn) with that race of outcasts, of which so terrific a picture is presented by recent writers—the poor of Europe?—a race among no inconsiderable portion of whom famine and pestilence may be said to dwell continually; many of whom are without morals, without education, without a country, without a God! and may be said to know society only by the terrors of its penal code, and to live in perpetual war with it. Poor bondmen! mocked with the name of liberty, that they may be sometimes tempted to break their chains, in order that, after a few days of starvation in idleness and dissipation, they may be driven back to their prison-house to take their shackles up again, heavier and more galling than before; severed, as it has been touchingly expressed, from nature, from the common air, and the light of the sun; knowing only by hearsay that the fields are green, that the birds sing, and that there is a perfume in flowers!
And is it with a race whom the perverse institutions of Europe have thus degraded beneath the condition of humanity that the advocates, the patrons, the protectors, of our working-men, presume to compare them? Sir, it is to treat them with a scorn at which their spirit should revolt, and does revolt.