There is a lot of sentiment going around the world strangely at variance
with human action. No one lives as he professes to believe, as he says he
thinks. Men declare a thing to be true but act as though they wished it
false. It is frequently stated that:
“Honor and shame from no condition rise,
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.”
Who believes it? Did Pope when he wrote it? Does a person that reads it? I
doubt it.
It ought to be true, perhaps, that men should be respected, honored, and
praised just as much for carrying a hod well as for writing a poem or
acting Hamlet well, but it is not so regarded.
A man as a man may be just as worthy, just as honorable, just as much
deserving the respect of his fellows who uses a pick and shovel on the
highway, but it is a fact that the common laborer as such is not respected
nor honored as much as the man who pays him for his labor. All the honor
may lie in doing well whatever he has to do, but it is _what a man does_,
not how he does it, that receives the honor of the world, just the same.
Probably thousands of women are acting well their part as washerwomen in
Boston at this time, but are they honored as Sarah Bernhardt is for acting
Cleopatra? Would wealthy women pay ten dollars to see a woman scrub a
floor, even if she could scrub better than any woman who ever scrubbed
before? We guess not. There is the point.
There is no such epitaph as this on the marble of the world: He acted well
his part as a coal-heaver. It is true that Lincoln is pointed to as having
been a rail-splitter when a young man, but had he never been anything else
he would not have had a monument an inch above the ground. It is not
Garfield the tow-boy, but Garfield the statesman, the President, that is
honored.
It is a fact that merit is not always appreciated, but it is equally a
fact that no merit is seen in the common occupations of life. A person
might wear his fingers to bones in what is regarded as menial employment,
and all his giant labor would not call forth a single word of praise. A
dollar or two a day is all the reward the world gives for manual labor. No
one sees heroism in farm work, in kitchen work. No one contributes money
to erect a statue to the hod-carrier. Work is not honored. The man or
woman who is obliged to work in order to live is regarded with pity or
contempt by those who live upon the labor of others.
It is not true that all the honor lies in doing well whatever we have to
do. Such a saying is as false as to say “Ask, and you shall receive.”
Honor is not given gratuitously. It has to be earned. But it is a fact
that we do not honor all labor, all virtue, equally.