“See frae a’ quarters, east and west, I’ drwoves th’ country coman, Wheyle flocks o’ naigs an’ kye are press’d By flocks o’ men an’ women; Buss’d i’ their best the blythesome troop Bang forrat helter-skelter, Wheyle monny ’mang the mingled group O’ th’ geat war fit to swelter Wi’ heat that day. * * * * * Whist! what’s yon noise amang yon crowd, Yon rantin an’ huzzain? Whar trumpets skirl an’ drums beat loud, An’ organs sweet are pleyin.” _Rosley Fair._ The Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Countries is the first public national expression ever made in this country, as to the dignity and artistic quality of labour. Our “working men,” until within the last few years, we have been in the habit of looking upon as mere labourers—as muscular machines—creatures with whom the spinning-jenny and the power-loom might be brought into competition, and whom the sense of fatigue, and consequent demand for rest, rendered immeasurably inferior “as producers,” to the instruments of brass and iron. It is only within the last ten years, perhaps, that we have got to acknowledge the artistic and intellectual quality of many forms of manual labour, speaking of certain classes of operatives no longer as handicraftsmen—that is to say, as men who, from long habit, acquired a dexterity of finger which fitted them for the “automatic” performance of certain operations,—but styling them artisans, or the artists of our manufactures. It is because we have been so slow to perceive and express this “great fact”—the artistic character of artisanship—that so much intellectual power has been lost to society, and there has been so much more toil and suffering in the world than there has been any necessity for. Had we, as a really great people, been impressed with the sense of the heavy debt we owed to labour, we should long ago have sought to acknowledge and respect the mental operations connected with many forms of it, and have striven to have ennobled and embellished and enlivened the intellect of those several modes of industry that still remained as purely physical employments among us. Had the men of mind done as much for the men of labour, as these had done for those, we might long ago have learned how to have made toil pleasant rather than irksome, and to have rendered it noble instead of mean. The ploughman, at the tail of the plough, has been allowed to continue with us almost the same animal as the horses in front of it, with no other incentive to work but the craving of his stomach.