Work: The Growing Aversion to Honest Labor
THERE is a growing aversion to honest hard work. Men and women scheme and calculate how to evade any such severe necessity. Besides, wants were never so many, and passion for fashionable living was never so general. Fashion is not only a giddy and heartless goddess, but to worship her in the use of her extended and tinselled ritual, requires a royal exchequer. Now, it is impossible, simply and utterly impossible, for the bulk of the people to meet all the requirements of fashionable life, to come in proper equipment to every shrine of this extravagant goddess of fashion, and do it honorably and honestly, or by hard, earnest, fair toil. The result is that thousands of men and women, in their zeal for style and dress—for splendid gear and extravagant outfit—will turn away from the simple ways of life, and the simple, honest vocations by which a plain, decent livelihood is to be obtained, to trick and scheme, and so evade the severe necessities and discipline that honest labor imposes. We only state a fact when we say that an odium has come to rest on the plain and simpler industries. Men now are ashamed to plow, and sow, and reap. In the olden times to till the ground was a glory. Now the farmer is an amateur, and his work is done, not by his hands, nor his son's hands, but by the hands of a mere menial. His sons, instead, seek the “learned professions,” clerkships, agencies of insurance companies, berths as book-keepers and the like, and before their beards are grown they quit the country home, and air, and beauty, and crowd the cities, in quest of a “gentleman's” calling and a “gentleman's” life. So it is with the young women. They must all, and they all will, be “ladies.” They must all have very white skin, very delicate little hands, very neat and “fashionable” forms, and their wardrobes must not lack even a ribbon, or latest style of shoe-lace. And where all this tends, and into what bad results it leads, we already see. Whenever people come to look upon work, no matter how humble and homely, as something to be endured, as something that is disgraceful, as something to be done only as a necessity, then we are threatened with most grave peril. It is time this question was getting an earnest and vigorous handling. It is time heartless fashion got its rebuke. It is time to assail the foolish pride that induces young men to lounge and steal rather than cut wood or lay stones in a wall. It is time that young women who would sooner be “nice” than industrious, or dress nicely and glitter with jewelry than to work hard and be honest, were told of the ruin that threatens them.—Methodist Recorder.