Manliness is postponed and wealth preferred. "What a fine house is this," one often says; "what furniture; what feasting. But the master of the house!--why every stone out of the wall laughs at him. He spent all of himself in getting this pretty show together, and now it is empty, and mocks its owner. He is the emblematic coffin at the Egyptian feast." "Oh, man!" says the looker-on, "why not furnish thyself with a mind, and conscience, a heart and a soul, before getting all this brass and mahogany together; this beef and these wines?" The poor wight would answer,--"Why, Sir, there were none such in the market!"--The young man does not say, "I will first of all things be a man, and so being will have this thing and the other," putting the agreeable after the essential. But he says, "First of all, by hook or by crook, I will have money, the manhood may take care of itself." He has it,--for tough and hard as the old world is, it is somewhat fluid before a strong man who resolutely grapples with difficulty and will swim through, it can be made to serve his turn. He has money, but the man has evaporated in the process; when you look he is not there. True, other nations have done the same thing, and we only repeat their experiment. The old devil of conformity says to our American Adam and Eve, "Do this and you shall be as gods," a promise as likely to hold good as the devil's did in the beginning. A man was meant for something more than a tassel to a large estate, and a woman to be more than a rich housekeeper. With this offensive materialism we copy the vices of feudal aristocracy abroad, making our vulgarity still more ridiculous. We are ambitious or proud of wealth, which is but labor stored up, and at the same time are ashamed of labor which is wealth in process. With all our talk about democracy, labor is thought less honorable in Boston than in Berlin and Leipsic. Thriving men are afraid their children will be shoemakers, or ply some such honorable and useful craft. Yet little pains are taken to elevate the condition or improve the manners and morals of those who do all the manual work of society. The strong man takes care that his children and himself escape that condition. We do not believe that all stations are alike honorable if honorably filled; we have little desire to equalize the burdens of life, so that there shall be no degraded class; none cursed with work, none with idleness. It is popular to endow a college; vulgar to take an interest in common schools. Liberty is a fact, equality a word, and fraternity, we do not think of yet.