If by any means the mental energies can be combined with the muscles, the product of labor will be greatly increased, and the time producing the same quantity lessened. Struggling labor hardly sees that in the short space of about thirty years the time has been lessened from thirteen and fourteen hours to ten hours per day, and the wages enhanced from fifty and seventy-five cents per day to an average of two dollars per day. In most of the prominent manufacturing establishments throughout the North we are at a near approach to a reduction of time to eight hours—_and may God speed the day_. Take the advance in quantity of products for ten years only, and by the aid of machinery, and more intelligent labor, we have gained more than two hours. Why should not labor get its due proportion? We are fast turning the drudgery of labor to pleasure. You need but visit the dish-washing and laundry-rooms at the Hotel Athenæum to witness the truth of what I state. Some years ago I made an estimate of the number of inhabitants it would require to do by hard labor that which was done at that time by twelve thousand inhabitants by the use of steam and water power. It reached the enormous number of three hundred thousand inhabitants. From this we may learn that it will not be a great hardship to give to labor more leisure and more pay, not rashly as by strikes, but by prudent and gradual measures. Ah, the wealth of nations rests in this art! The power to subdue forests and belt empires with railroads and telegraphs, and ignore distance is in its hands. This art sends forth its missionary in its manufactured products to all quarters of the globe; every different product is a copy of a volume on some subject, carrying with it some Christian’s impress and prayer. So true is this that it needs no great expert to tell an article made by Christian hands from that made by heathen. This power of the individuality impresses with interest and wonder. How readily thoughts in words are detected from others, even on the same subject. Every workman of a manufactured article in some such sense makes his individual impress on the work he performs, and it is as readily told. The Christian, liberty-loving intelligence is pressed into every article and sent forth on its mission of preaching the gospel to every creature, even gaining entrance where the missionary is refused. With this truth in mind, with what renewed pleasure must the liberated laborer make still greater impress of his individual mind. This thought can be carried into all that we do. Our walk, our talk, and the expression of our faces all enter into our products of whatever kind. How important that it should be imbued with the spirit of intelligent Christianity.