exercise. The superior faculty of one man over another, and the accidents of life, which for good or for ill make sport of all human faculty, render the condition of society in respect to wealth full of variety. One man becomes rich without merit, and another poor without crime. One man has the blessing of Providence on his industry; another its curses on his laziness. A desire for the acquisition of property is the spring of human industry. Without property in some way acquired, a man starves, or is a houseless vagabond on the charity of his neighbors. Labor of some sort is the prescribed means of acquiring it, and hence an assiduous employment of time, in some lawful occupation, is among the most prominent private virtues. The encouragement of labor implies that its rewards shall be secured, and held to be the evidence of an honorable obedience to the laws of society under which they are obtained. But what is property, as a reward of labor, but the possession of the means of personal enjoyment; and what is the difference between little and much, but the extent or limitation of those means in the hands of the possessor? All the progressive states of property, as it rises from the means of bare subsistence to comfort, luxury, or the splendor and magnificence of wealth, are but degrees of that power which is, by the institutions of the most theoretically democratic society, conferred on those who possess property in conformity to its laws. To say that a man of property has more means than his neighbor, is only to say, in other words, that he is a rich man, To say he thereby enjoys more advantages, is only to say that he uses those means at his pleasure. To complain of this, as an unreasonable inequality, is not merely to censure the institutions of the country, but the course of Providence, and the moral constitution of man. To found on this variety in condition an hostility between the two classes, always temporary in the individuals composing them, and constantly changing in their relative numbers, is to pervert the necessary condition of an active and enterprising people, into a cause of anarchy and confusion. What is termed property, is made such by the force of municipal law, and is therefore held by its possessors under limitations, and according to conditions, which the law, in our country another name for the general will, sees fit to prescribe. Hence, with a strong hand but a prudent policy, the law prevents its accumulation by entail, and annihilates the aristocracy of primogeniture by a statute of distributions which is the Magna Charta of Republicanism. Wealth can never, in this country, constitute a permanent patrician order. The tide of time rolls over it, and its sands are mingled with the dust of earth, to be re-gathered and melted into new ingots by some hardy son of successful labor, himself the founder of a family equally transitory. The possessors of wealth are unquestionably answerable to their country and to public opinion for the manner in which it is employed. Individual cases of oppression and extortion, no doubt, are to be found, but the days of hoarding avarice are gone by. Wealth must be used to be of any value, and it is therefore mixed in the common mass of the wares and merchandise of commerce and the materials of labor. You find it invested in the mansions that beautify your cities; in the rich farms that make the country one great garden of fertility; in the ships which carry your commerce over the globe;-in your Rail Roads, whose iron arms bind your whole country in one neighborhood of kindred families;-in those countless steam-boats, which cover your mighty rivers and broad lakes; in those manufacturing establishments, which give employment to your native population, and keep the sons and daughters of Massachusetts within the influence of the institutions, and enable them to preserve the character and prosperity of the old Bay State; in those associations which lend capital to industry, or - divide the misfortunes of life; in those more noble institutions of Education and Benevolence, where Charity ministers to the wretchedness of bodily anguish; and Intelligence pours her exhaustless treasures upon the mind. It is common to express and to feel an honorable pride in the wealth of the country. Its growing and almost illimitable wealth is the boast of patriotism with all political parties and all public men. In what does this wealth consist? Simply in the prosperity and affluence of the people. The country has no hereditary domain. Its wild lands are worth nothing till they are purchased and paid for by its citizens. Their separate individual possessions constitute the treasury of national wealth. The wealth of the citizen, it is equally obvious, is at once the source and the reward of labor. Mere labor like mere gold can do nothing. The hands of man, without tools, would hardly keep him from starving; and gold, if it could not find hands to employ, would be equally useless. Acting together they produce those magnificent results, which out-run the boldest imagination. It is the indissoluble copartnership of capital and labor that constitutes the business firm for enterprises of gigantic magnitude. It is the harmonious co-operation of the in-door and out-door partner, that sustains them and proceeds with them to a successful result. There can be no quarrel between actual capital and honest labor. The head cannot say to the hands, I have no need of thee, nor the hands to the feet, I have no need of thee. The man who has property, and the man who is willing to work for it, easily understand one another, and join hand in hand; but the man who has no property and no disposition to earn any, who lives upon credit with no means and no expectation of repayment, who speculates on the chance, that if he is successful the gain will be his, and if he fails, the loss will be his creditors, rapacious of other people's property, and prodigal when he has any of his own, he it is that deranges the order and business of life, and imitating the style and splendor of wealth, brings in his bankruptcy, ruin on innocent sufferers, and odium on the class to which he affected to belong. It is extremely objectionable to take the condition of the laboring classes in other countries, and argue from their degradation, that a like state does, or will exist among our own. There, the people lie under the weight of ancient institutions, established in darker ages, and not only vicious in themselves, but accumulating their evils from century to century, until the present mass becomes intolerable, and yet irremediable without a revolu tion. Our institutions, on the contrary, are brought out in the bright days of intelligence and freedom. The immense disparity of individual fortune there seen, does not so much establish classes in the same society, as it divides society into two or more distinct, and it may be, hostile parts. Here such disparity does not exist at all, and the tendency to it is constantly checked within the life of the fortunate individual. There is no such thing among our free population as excessive labor, because there is no need of it, with such exceptions indeed of particular cases, as serve to prove the generality of the rule. Fashion too, though she sometimes plays very fantastic tricks, does not quite turn night into day, and make labor necessary at unreasonable periods; and where there is a tendency to this species of folly, there is a salutary control in public opinion. There are no classes of respectably idle men among us. All idlers of whatever degree, go by the common name of Loafers. must do something; and he loses his station in society, if while he is of a proper age to labor, he has no regular and honorable employment. It was the remark of a foreigner, that Boston was the hardest place in the world to find any body to help him do nothing. Every man, to be respectable, The consequence of all this industry is wealth, and the result of wealth is luxury; and luxury, according to some modern economists, is injurious to honest labor and a defect of the social system. But a vast proportion of all the active employment of mechanic industry in the United States grows out of the factitious wants of luxury and wealth; and these wants, and the supply of them, constitute that circulation of capital and labor, which preserves, not the mere health, but the elastic and buoyant spirit of the people. Unquestionably like every thing else, luxury may be carried to a dangerous excess. It may interfere with charity and even humanity. It may enervate the body politic by an effeminacy that is degrading, and by an example that is ruinous. All this is the extravagance, the abuse of a condition of things which may, nevertheless, be salutary in its legitimate operation. But the evil where it exists is not in our social system, but in the ill-regulated character of individual man. It is to be controlled like any other of the disorders of society, not by changing the social institutions, but by infusing a higher moral principle into the bosom of the community. It is not easy to point out the exact line which divides luxury from convenience, comfort or even necessity. It is undoubtedly a shifting line, to be drawn according to personal means, and the power of example under a moral restraint imposed on the citizen. For all these obligations the individual himself is answerable on his responsibility for his personal conduct; but luxury itself is the patron of all the arts, inasmuch as they are essentially devoted to the refinements and elegance of life. "Allow not nature more than nature wants, It would hardly do for our society to adopt a different doctrine. Let this magnificent exhibition be annihilated; let the products of mechanic skill be crushed by some ascetic or Spartan philosophy, and the |