The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 303: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

230 THE STEAM PACKET. Lord So-and-so’s hounds, won such-and-such a stake at Doncaster or Epsom, or drove down Regent Street in such-and-such a turn-out. From having revelled in every kind of luxury, and indulged in all species of extravagance, they have fallen down to a condition almost bordering upon mendicity—their only visible means of support being the bounty of their friends. Of course the gaming-table, the bilhiard- room, ana private play afford certain subsidies at various times ;—but those are precarious ; and the routine of the existence of the expatri- ated English dwelling in Calais is a perpetual struggle after the means of support. Each day brings its new devices to obtain the principal meal—and each day may some new meanness, some fresh delinquency, or some novel stroke of finesse be recorded in the history of their lives. How far more happy, and how useful as members of society would those men become, were they to emigrate to some land where; by labour and diligence, they might again achieve for themselves a com- petency independent of the precarious bounty of friends or the chances of the gaming-table? They would reply, were such a proposal made to them, that they could not forget that they were once gentlemen. This is the answer, too, of many hundreds—aye, thousands of young men who, ruined in hopes and fortunes, are still hanging about those great cities which were the scenes of their former frolics and gaieties— their debaucheries and their vices. How changed is this disposition in the American—how different the conduct of the ruined Yankees! Let us not despise the mdependent soul of the backwoodsman im the far west ; nor contemn those hopeful tokens of these times, when American poets and scholars are turning their faces to the fields, not to find flowers and rivulets there, but the rich harvest of corn and grain ;—yes, looking at labour in the land and in the workshop as the true school for the intellect and the soul—returning to the simplicity of mnoeence and natural habits by the discipline of a high refinement of the man- ners and cultivation of the mind. Extremes meet; and the American poet and scholar are now doing from choice, by arguments drawn from experience and thought, what the husbandman does by the promptings of necessity, the calls of hunger, and the sense of self-preservation. It is not difficult to see what effect this must have upon the sons of labour in that land; what a new value will be given to the employments of manual labour ; what spring and sinew will be infused into the limbs of the labourer, when he finds the gifted, the cultivated, the rich and refined, coming back to repose upon the bosom of a mother they had begun to scorn! His labour will be lightened, not by requiring less physical exertion, but because his heart will be in it; it will be cheers. Gomichbooks (E(0)