Is It True

________________________________________________
Title:     Is It True
Author: Lemuel K. Washburn [More Titles by Washburn]

There is a lot of sentiment going around the world strangely at variance with human action. No one lives as he professes to believe, as he says he thinks. Men declare a thing to be true but act as though they wished it false. It is frequently stated that:

“Honor and shame from no condition rise,
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.”

Who believes it? Did Pope when he wrote it? Does a person that reads it? I doubt it.

It ought to be true, perhaps, that men should be respected, honored, and praised just as much for carrying a hod well as for writing a poem or acting Hamlet well, but it is not so regarded.

A man as a man may be just as worthy, just as honorable, just as much deserving the respect of his fellows who uses a pick and shovel on the highway, but it is a fact that the common laborer as such is not respected nor honored as much as the man who pays him for his labor. All the honor may lie in doing well whatever he has to do, but it is what a man does, not how he does it, that receives the honor of the world, just the same. Probably thousands of women are acting well their part as washerwomen in Boston at this time, but are they honored as Sarah Bernhardt is for acting Cleopatra? Would wealthy women pay ten dollars to see a woman scrub a floor, even if she could scrub better than any woman who ever scrubbed before? We guess not. There is the point.

There is no such epitaph as this on the marble of the world: He acted well his part as a coal-heaver. It is true that Lincoln is pointed to as having been a rail-splitter when a young man, but had he never been anything else he would not have had a monument an inch above the ground. It is not Garfield the tow-boy, but Garfield the statesman, the President, that is honored.

It is a fact that merit is not always appreciated, but it is equally a fact that no merit is seen in the common occupations of life. A person might wear his fingers to bones in what is regarded as menial employment, and all his giant labor would not call forth a single word of praise. A dollar or two a day is all the reward the world gives for manual labor. No one sees heroism in farm work, in kitchen work. No one contributes money to erect a statue to the hod-carrier. Work is not honored. The man or woman who is obliged to work in order to live is regarded with pity or contempt by those who live upon the labor of others.

It is not true that all the honor lies in doing well whatever we have to do. Such a saying is as false as to say “Ask, and you shall receive.” Honor is not given gratuitously. It has to be earned. But it is a fact that we do not honor all labor, all virtue, equally.

[The end]
Lemuel K. Washburn's essay: Is It True

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN