In this country most young men are poor. Time is the rock from which they are to hew out their fortunes; and health, enterprise, and integrity, the instruments with which to do it. For this, diligence in business, abstinence from pleasures, privation even, of everything that does not endanger health, are to be joyfully welcomed and borne. When we look around us, and see how much of the wickedness of the world springs from poverty, it seems to sanctify all honest efforts for the acquisition of an independence; but when an independence is acquired, then comes the moral crisis, then comes an Ithuriel test, which shows whether a man is higher than a common man, or lower than a common reptile. In the duty of accumulation--and I call it a _duty_, in the most strict and literal signification of that word--all below a competence is most valuable, and its acquisition most laudable; but all above a fortune is a misfortune. It is a misfortune to him who amasses it; for it is a voluntary continuance in the harness of a beast of burden, when the soul should enfranchise and lift itself up into a higher region of pursuits and pleasures. It is a persistence in the work of providing goods for the body after the body has already been provided for; and it is a denial of the higher demands of the soul, after the time has arrived, and the means are possessed, of fulfilling those demands.... Because the lower service was once necessary, and has, therefore, been performed, it is a mighty wrong, when, without being longer necessary, it usurps the sacred rights of the higher. * * * * * =_Orestes A. Brownson, 1800-._= (Manual, p. 480.) From "New Views." =_159._= THE DUTY OF PROGRESS.