I believe that labor is a blessing. It never was and never will be a curse. It is a blessed thing to labor for your wife and children, for your father and mother, and for the ones you love. It is a blessed thing to have an object in life--something to do-- something to call into play your best thoughts, to develop your faculties and to make you a man. How beautiful, how charming, are the dreams of the young mechanic, the artist, the musician, the actor and the student. How perfectly stupid must be the life of a young man with nothing to do, no ambition, no enthusiasm--that is to say, nothing of the divine in him; the young man with an object in life, of whose brain a great thought, a great dream has taken possession, and in whose heart there is a great, throbbing hope. He looks forward to success--to wife, children, home--all the blessings and sacred joys of human life. He thinks of wealth and fame and honor, and of a long, genial, golden, happy autumn. Work gives the feeling of independence, of self-respect. A man who does something necessarily puts a value on himself. He feels that he is a part of the world's force. The idler--no matter what he says, no matter how scornfully he may look at the laborer--in his very heart knows exactly what he is; he knows that he is a counterfeit, a poor worthless imitation of a man. But there is a vast difference between work and what I call "toil." What must be the life of a man who can earn only one dollar or two dollars a day? If this man has a wife and a couple of children how can the family live? What must they eat? What must they wear? From the cradle to the coffin they are ignorant of any luxury of life. If the man is sick, if one of the children dies, how can doctors and medicines be paid for? How can the coffin or the grave be purchased? These people live on what might be called "the snow line"--just at that point where trees end and the mosses begin. What are such lives worth? The wages of months would hardly pay for the ordinary dinner of the family of a rich man. The savings of a whole life would not purchase one fashionable dress, or the lace on it. Such a man could not save enough during his whole life to pay for the flowers of a fashionable funeral. And yet how often hundreds of thousands of persons, who spend thousands of dollars every year on luxuries, really wonder why the laboring people should complain. They are astonished when a car driver objects to working fourteen hours a day. Men give millions of dollars to carry the gospel to the heathen, and leave their own neighbors without bread; and these same people insist on closing libraries and museums of art on Sunday, and yet Sunday is the only day that these institutions can be visited by the poor.