Travail

“ Arise and labour ere the time of reckoning, Ere the long shadows and the night draw night. Wherefore idle?—Swing the sickle stoutly! Bind thy rich sheaves exultingly and fast! Nothing dismayed, do thy great task devoutly— Patient and strong, and hopeful to the last! Wherefore idle?—Labour, not inaction, Is the soul's birthright, and its truest rest; Up to thy work!—It is Nature's fit exaction— He who toils humblest, bravest, toils the best. ”

“ Labor is rest—from the sorrows that greet us;
Rest from all petty vexations that meet us.
Rest from sin-promptings that ever entreat us.
Rest from world-sirens that lead us to ill.
Work,—and pure slumbers shall wait on thy pillow;
Work,—thou shalt ride o’er care’s coming billow ”

“ I have never regarded cooking in the light of mere manual labor. Labor, it seems to me, is work that is distasteful and only performed from necessity; a “labor of love” seems to me to be a paradox. Work, on the contrary, may be as keen a source of pleasure as recreation. Work may be the striving of an artist to attain his ideal. The very word “labor” suggests pain and exhaustion.9 We speak of an author’s “works,” but who would think of referring to them as his “labors”? ”

“ It is the high born, the cultivated, the intelligent, the brave, the generous, who are now constrained to work with their own hands. Labor is thus associated in our minds with all that is honorable in birth, refined in manners, bright in intellect, manly in character and magnanimous in soul.... Now that labor has been dignified and cherished we want it to be recognized in our schools and colleges.... ”

“ I know that labor is the Atlas on whose shoulders rests the great superstructure of civilization and the great dome of science adorned with all there is of art. Labor is the great oak, labor is the great column, and labor, with its deft and cunning hands, has created the countless things of art and beauty. ”

“ The employment forms the habits of body and mind, and these are the constitution of the man,—the greater part of his moral or persistent nature, whatever effort, under special excitement, he may make to change or overcome them. Employment is the half, and the primal half, of education—it is the warp of it; and the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently woven pattern depends wholly on its straightness and strength. ”

“ Labour is not only a necessity and a duty, but a blessing: only the idler feels it to be a curse. The duty of work is written on the thews and muscles of the limbs, the mechanism of the hand, the nerves and lobes of the brain—the sum of whose healthy action is satisfaction and enjoyment. In the school of labour is taught the best practical wisdom; nor is a life of manual employment, as we shall hereafter find, incompatible with high mental culture. ”

“ The craftsman, the artist, the scientist, the professional man, and to some extent the business man make new experience the basis of organized activity, of work, and produce thereby social values. The division of labor which removes the problematical from the various operations of the work makes the task totally unstimulating. ”

“ Work in the factory or in the office, work which brings us into contact with the outside world, calls for the exercise of qualities and attainments which we had no need of before, for the abandonment of habits and ideas which can only hamper our progress in our changed surroundings. ”

“ In work of the finer order, dealing with the more impressionable material, there are discoverable not only the character and quality of the worker, but the conditions under which he lives; the stage of civilisation, the vigour or languor of vital energy, the richness or poverty of social life, the character of the soil and of the landscape, the pallor or the bloom of vegetation, the shining or the veiling of the skies. ”

“ You will see now, my dear son, why I have been so earnest to have you establish in early life a habit of industry, and to cultivate a taste for daily, honest labor. No matter what employment you have, if it is honorable employment. ”

“ The wiser man, the labourer, begins at his corner of the wood, and makes out a task for himself for each day. Let not our imaginations be employed on one side only. Think, that large as may appear the work to be done—so too the result of any endeavour, however small in itself, may be of infinite extent in the future. ”

“ Work was the foundation of the Organization—the work day, the work hour, the work minute. This was the basic commodity, the medium of exchange, the measure of social status. Work to pay off your tax debt. Work to climb the rungs on the ladder that led to freedom. ”

“ I do not mean work in the sense of bread,—I mean work in the sense of mental interest; for those who either are placed above the necessity of labour for their bread, or who will not work although they should. ”

“ The labour which you have paid for, does indeed become, by the act of purchase, your own labour: you have bought the hands and the time of those workers; they are, by right and justice, your own hands, your own time. ”

“ Sound work, clean work, finished work; feeble work, slack work, sham work—these words express an identical contrast in many different departments of activity. In so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally. ”

“ Labor! labor! labor! physical, mental and spiritual labor!
Labor, therefore, is the fulcrum of the great lever of progress, lifting humanity from the material up to the spiritual realm. One short century ago nearly all physical labor was performed by the hands of man. Since then the mind has come up to the work, and rescued the body from the laborious servitude of former times; and now a single mind, directing a single machine, produces an hundred-fold more than it could when acting through its own personal machine. ”

“ There are trees to be felled, land to be plowed, and many other things to be done. If you will do these things some one else will be released to perform works of skill; and as these are the most agreeable to the worker, it would please us more to have you labor in the fields than in the workhouse. ”

“ For a time I felt that having brought about in my own mills a relation between capital and labor which I may go so far as to term ideal, and having published my book, my philosophy of an employer's life, I had contributed my utmost to the cause of industrial civilization. ”

“ Was all that labor more wearing to health and strength than the cruel bondage in which we live, while laboring to secure, from servants, the care and efficient work absolutely necessary to the present style of living? ”

“ Work is the participation of man in production through the voluntary exercise of his intellectual and manual faculties, according to his particular vocation, in keeping with the decorum and comfort of his life, and for the better development of the national economy.
⁠2. By virtue of its essentially personal and human nature, labour cannot be reduced to a material concept of merchandise, nor be the object of any transaction incompatible with the personal dignity of the worker. ”

“ Say the men,—the wage earners,—toilers with the hands, multitudes, multitudes, who on the earth and beneath it, in your town and yours and yours, are at labor now, that we may be here—clean and at leisure. ”

“ The term labor is used, thirdly, in a more restricted, very popular and current, but very ill-defined way, to designate a limited sub-group among those who live by contributing productive efforts to the work of society. ”

“ I was surprised to find that physical labor here, as on earth, was one of the chief means employed to assist in mental growth; and I found swarms of English, Irish, and German people happily at work, cultivating the land and erecting houses for themselves and others, and assisting in the great machinery of life, which here, as in the other world, revolves its constant round. ”

“ But the true doctrine that labour should be a real tangible blessing in itself to the working man, a pleasure even as sleep and strong drink are to him now: this one might think it hard indeed for him to understand, so different as it is to anything which he has found labour to be. ”

“ One gets the sense that the labour, with its multiplied incidents and opportunities, is just unlimitedly inspiring to the keen spirit or the sympathetic soul, the recruit with energies and resources on hand that plead with him for the beauty of the vivid and palpable social result. ”

“ I know not how to offer you specific advice respecting this important matter, and fortunately I think it is not needed; for all general knowledge expands the mind, clears it of prejudice, and qualifies it for application to any particular subject; and where the field is so wide, and the labour required so vast and diversified, each labourer must select that style of work which he finds most congenial to his taste and best suited to his powers. ”

“ When you speak to the average person about labor—industrial work, especially—he seems to [Pg 122] get the idea at once that you are opposed to his head being educated—that you simply wish to put him to work. ”

“ And yet, my boy, there are many in the world, with larger responsibilities than yours are at present; think, for instance, of a great employer of labour who has to decide great things, affecting, perhaps, the welfare of both his employés and his business. ”

“ Labour will be thought honourable—idleness a disgrace. Productive activity will be deemed a glory, and riches its result, the greatest of all mere outside and personal distinctions. The tools must be for whoso can handle them. ”

“ Labor is either bodily or mental; or, to express the distinction more comprehensively, either muscular or nervous; and it is necessary to include in the idea, not solely the exertion itself, but all feelings of a disagreeable kind, all bodily inconvenience or mental annoyance, connected with the employment of one's thoughts, or muscles, or both, in a particular occupation. ”

“ Labor builds our meeting-houses, temples, court houses, fine halls for music and fine school houses; it is labor that teaches our children, and makes them acquainted with the various branches of education, that makes them proficient in their own language and in other languages, and in every branch of knowledge understood by the children of men; and all this enhances the wealth and the glory and the comfort of any people on the earth. 16:66.
We say to the-Latter-day Saints, work for these capitalists, and work honestly and faithfully, and they will pay you faithfully. ”

“ That labor is best, in which the laborer knows that he will derive the profits of his industry, that his employment depends upon his diligence, and his reward upon this assiduity. He then has every motive to excite him to exertion, and to animate him in perseverance. He knows that if he is treated badly he can exchange his employer, for one who will better estimate his service ”

“ He brought to the solution of the question of labor in this country not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in sympathy with labor, full of the culture of labor, bearing witness to the dignity and excellence of work in every muscle that work had toughened and every sense that work had made clear and true. ”

“ There will be simply labour and the necessary conditions of labour,—the sun which warms all, the air which they breathe, water which they drink, land on which they labour, clothes on the body, food in the stomach, stakes, shovels, ploughs, machines with which they work. ”

“ Now if he should chance, in the course of such an education, to learn the habits of temperance, frugality, and industry, and qualify himself, after the hard labour of many years, for the employment or profession of a divine, a statesman, a lawyer, a physician, an artist, a merchant, &c. ”

“ Modern view of labor. It is only in the most recent times, and imperfectly as yet, that labor has been recognized as a blessing, or, at worst, as a necessity which has great moral and social compensations, and which, if rightly understood and 162wisely used, brings joy and satisfaction. This can only be true, however, when labor is crowned by achievement, and that is when it is productive of wealth. ”

“ Since those days I have written books myself, and in doing so have tried to remember, and to act on the remembrance, that the labor spent in logically ordering one's thoughts, and in saying what one has to say clearly and correctly, is labor well bestowed. ”

“ Human labour cannot, it is notorious, have full knowledge of and free access to all sorts of work, from the work of research and invention, or of business control, to the various grades of mental and manual skilled and unskilled labour. ”

“ And it would do you all the good in the world if you had a job that made you scramble and rub elbows with your fellow-men. Now, if I could get you a job, for, say, two or three days a week, one that would allow you heaps of time for your proper work—would you take it? ”

“ Even though these labours had been nothing more than an attempt on man's part to penetrate the workshop of nature and ascertain the hidden processes of an Almighty Worker, they would have been invaluable as a serviceable hypothesis for future efforts. ”

“ And it struck me, that the best thing of all would be to arrange the occupations of the day in such a manner as to exercise all four of man’s capacities, and myself produce all these four sorts of benefits which men make use of, so that one portion of the day, the first, should be dedicated to hard labor; the second, to intellectual labor; the third, to artisan labor ”

“ A Manufacturer reckons upon the Labour of his Servants, for the Execution of any Work, as much as upon the Tools he employs, and would be equally surpriz'd, in the one Case, were his Expectations disappointed, as in the other. ”