The Nobility of Labor

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · May 24, 1877

The Nobility of Labor.

BLOOD never makes a nobleman. The blood of the king is as poor as that of the peasant and often poorer. The blood of the autocrat, whose whisper shakes a nation and whose nod awes a continent, is no more crimson or of greater virtue than that serf which the autocrat despises. Birth never endows nobility. The magnificence of the cradle or the tinted frescoing and gorgeous drapery of the palace, never created rank. He alone is a nobleman who has made the world better and happier for having lived; who has fringed the clouds with silver beauty; planted the rose and watered it into bloom upon the desert waste; beautified the forest wilds, or gathered the splendors of the valley into symmetry.

There are millions of noblemen's graves, over which a tear was never shed, and which time has leveled to the even surface of the prairie, but the glow of their nobility which streams back through centuries charms a world into humble worship of its sublimity and genuine worth. Many a man has died unhonored and unsung, who left in every footprint, from his childhood to the tomb, a rich and brilliant legacy to the world, and no legacy ever worth commemorating was ever left the world, which was not baptized in the sweat of honest toil. From mental and physical exertion, the earth has been made to blossom, the seas have been covered with life, civilization has shot its sunshine into the gloom of rudeness, and Christianity has rained its softness into the world. On every field that bears a tempting harvest on its breast, on every brick in every building that was ever reared, on every book of value that was ever written, on every thought that burns to light the world, in every workshop and mine, and furnace and factory—wherever labor sweats are written the credentials of nobility.—Western Rural.