kind of work be despised?  They also pay taxes, give an equivalent of labour for their keep, rear children, educate them, and send them out to be of some service to the State; what does the dweller in cities do more than these?  If I were disposed to argue the question, I should contend that the man who gets a bushel of corn or a sack of good potatoes out of the land has added a more real asset to the wealth of the community, and therefore deserves more praise from the commonwealth, than all the tribe of stockbrokers since the world began; for these lords of wealth, who reign supreme in cities, produce nothing.  But since my friend is fond of quoting Browning, I also will quote him, and let the poet say in the flash of three lines what the dialectician would need a page to say: 

  All service ranks the same with God,—­
  God’s puppets, best and worst,
  Are we:  there is no last nor first,

Of course there is no disputing the general truth of the statement that nations are developed by the call made upon their energies by difficulty, and their power of response to that call.  But why should such a statement be construed into a reproach on my mode of life?  If my friend, who is probably sitting in a comfortable office at this moment, adding up figures which he could do almost with his eyes shut, would condescend to visit my potato patch, he would find call enough upon his energy.  I have almost broken my back, and certainly blistered my hands, for the last four hours in hoeing my potato trenches into good level lines, and I have still an hour’s work at weeding to do before I can satisfy myself that I have earned my dinner.  I can assure him that bread-fruit does not grow on my land, nor am I in danger of being corrupted by a too easy means of subsistence.  The worst crime that can be alleged against me is that I have changed my occupation in life, but I am very far from being unoccupied.  The occupation which I now follow is the most ancient and most honourable in the world; I believe that Adam followed it.  Is it not a curious irony upon civilisation, that it has so filled the mind with artificial estimates of work, that a form of work which is still practised by the great majority of the world’s inhabitants is scarcely regarded as work at all by the insolent minority of mankind who happen to live in cities?  But I have long observed that there is a universal tendency in men only to regard as work the peculiar sort of work which they themselves do; and so the artisan supposes he is the only genuine ‘working man,’ and the shopkeeper thinks the life of the professional man a piece of organised idleness, and the tradition appears ineradicable that all the clergy, from bishops downwards, never work at all because they do not sit in offices.  It is of a piece with the theory of ‘doing good’; for all men are bigots when they attempt to measure the universal life of men by their own little egoistic standards.