life has lately got, from the bon-ton of the humanity of this day, the name of the “laboring poor.”  We have heard many plans for the relief of the “laboring poor.”  This puling jargon is not as innocent as it is foolish.  In meddling with great affairs, weakness is never innoxious.  Hitherto the name of poor (in the sense in which it is used to excite compassion) has not been used for those who can, but for those who cannot labor,—­for the sick and infirm, for orphan infancy, for languishing and decrepit age; but when we affect to pity, as poor, those who must labor or the world cannot exist, we are trifling with the condition of mankind.  It is the common doom of man, that he must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow,—­that is, by the sweat of his body or the sweat of his mind.  If this toil was inflicted as a curse, it is, as might be expected, from the curses of the Father of all blessings; it is tempered with many alleviations, many comforts.  Every attempt to fly from it, and to refuse the very terms of our existence, becomes much more truly a curse; and heavier pains and penalties fall upon those who would elude the tasks which are put upon them by the great Master Workman of the world, who, in His dealings with His creatures, sympathizes with their weakness, and, speaking of a creation wrought by mere will out of nothing, speaks of six days of labor and one of rest.  I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind and vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man poor; I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because they are men.  This affected pity only tends to dissatisfy them with their condition, and to teach them to seek resources where no resources are to be found, in something else than their own industry and frugality and sobriety.  Whatever may be the intention (which, because I do not know, I cannot dispute) of those who would discontent mankind by this strange pity, they act towards us, in the consequences, as if they were our worst enemies.

In turning our view from the lower to the higher classes, it will not be necessary for me to show at any length that the stock of the latter, as it consists in their numbers, has not yet suffered any material diminution.  I have not seen or heard it asserted; I have no reason to believe it:  there is no want of officers, that I have ever understood, for the new ships which we commission, or the new regiments which we raise.  In the nature of things, it is not with their persons that the higher classes principally pay their contingent to the demands of war.  There is another, and not less important part, which rests with almost exclusive weight upon them.  They furnish the means

        “how War may, best upheld,
    Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold,
    In all her equipage.”