We do not pray, or weep, or wail; We have no dread, No fear to pass beyond the veil That hides the dead. And yet we question, dream, and guess, But knowledge we do not possess. We ask, yet nothing seems to know; We cry in vain. There is no "master of the show" Who will explain, Or from the future tear the mask; And yet we dream, and still we ask Is there beyond the silent night An endless day? Is death a door that leads to light? We cannot say. The tongueless secret locked in fate We do not know.-- We hope and wait. PROGRESS. * This is the first lecture ever delivered by Mr. Ingersoll. The stars indicate the words missing in the manuscript. It was delivered in Pekin, 111., in 1860, and again in Bloomington, 111., in 1804. IT is admitted by all that happiness is the only good, happiness in its highest and grandest sense and the most * * springs * * of * * refined * * generous * * Conscience * * tends * * indirectly * * truly we * * physically * * to develop the wonderful powers of the mind is progress. It is impossible for men to become educated and refined without leisure and there can be no leisure without wealth and all wealth is produced by labor, nothing else. Nothing can * * the hands * * and * * fabrics * * service of civil * * and crumbles * * of all, and yet even in free America labor is not honored as it deserves. We should remember that the prosperity of the world depends upon the men who walk in the fresh furrows and through the rustling corn, upon those whose faces are radiant with the glare of furnaces, upon the delvers in dark mines, the workers in shops, upon those who give to the wintry air the ringing music of the axe, and upon those who wrestle with the wild waves of the raging sea. And it is from the surplus produced by labor that schools are built, that colleges and universities are founded and endowed. From this surplus the painter is paid for the immortal productions of the pencil. This pays the sculptor for chiseling the shapeless rock into forms of beauty almost divine, and the poet for singing the hopes, the loves and aspirations of the world. This surplus has erected all the palaces and temples, all the galleries of art, has given to us all the books in which we converse, as it were, with the dead kings of the human race, and has supplied us with all there is of elegance, of beauty and of refined happiness in the world. I am aware that the subject chosen by me is almost infinite and that in its broadest sense it is absolutely beyond the present comprehension of man.