Fifty Years of Freedom: with matters of vital importance to both the white and colored people of the United StatesGrimké, Francis J. (Francis James)
History
Fifty Years of Freedom: with matters of vital importance to both the white and colored people of the United States
Grimké, Francis J. (Francis James)
African Americans
(1). With the importance of being industrious. A lazy, thriftless,
indolent race is bound to go to the wall. The necessity of work on the
part of everybody must be fully appreciated ourselves and must be
carefully instilled into the young people who are to take our places
when we are gone. "The man who will not work," the apostle says,
"neither shall he eat." And this should be a fundamental principle with
us. The lazy man should be despised, should be driven out, should be
shown no consideration. "The idle man's brain is the devil's workshop,"
is an old saying, but it is a true one; and unless we continue to train
the race to the idea of steady, fixed employment as the proper, normal
condition for every one to sustain to the social organism of which he is
a part, the devil will be sure to get his work in, and use the
unemployed hand and brain for evil purposes.
(2). We need to impress ourselves with the importance of being
efficient. We must know how to do things; we must know how to do things
well. It isn't enough that a thing is done; it must be well done.
Quality in work is the thing that tells; and more and more as
competition increases we must impress ourselves with that fact. The old
adage, "Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well," we cannot
too strongly impress ourselves with. Inefficiency puts an individual of
a race always at a disadvantage. It is skill; it is the ability to do
well what is to be done that will always be preferred. It is the
skillful mechanic; the skillful artisan, the skillful stenographer and
typewriter that is always preferred, and that always wins out in the
struggle of life, other things being equal. It is the fittest that
survives in the industrial struggle and in every other avenue of life.
In planning for the future we must lay more and more stress therefore
upon the work of properly qualifying ourselves for service in all the
avenues of life. Carelessness, indifference here, the disposition to be
content with shoddy work, will be fatal to our success. We are living in
an age when the demand for efficiency, and efficiency of the highest
order, is becoming more and more insistent. Unless this fact is
recognized by us, and is allowed to shape our course, the struggle in
which we are engaged is a hopeless one; we are bound to go to the wall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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