The Daily News. SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1913. THE HEROISM OF WORK.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 18, 21 June 1913, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1913. THE HEROISM OF WORK.

Addressing the New Plymouth Brotherhood last week, the Itev. R. J. Liddell delivered an extremely interesting address, which we produce elsewhere, on ''Playing the Man." Of course, the point of view was naturally a little idealistic, but the deductions drawn by the speaker from the theme were eminently practical, fn more spiritual form he echoed much of the plain, straight breeziness of Carlyle's dissertation upon the heroism of work, with its; vivid appeal to humanity not to shape its labor on a basis of the minimum of its limitations, but upon the maximum of its possibilities. Turning to the cynicism of modern France, Mr. Liddell took as his text the cynical French epitaph, "Here dies he who, born a man, died a grocer." There is no reflection, of course, in the quotation against a very necessary trade, and the application lies simply in the baldness of its antithesis. The point that Rev. Liddell rightly strove to make was that if we are to be a nation of characterbuilders that object can only be obtained by individual effort in the particular stage of life which, as the Catechism says, "it lias pleased God to call us." The man who does just the amount of work he is paid to do and does it thoroughly may be of less value to the community than the man who, doing not such good work, is prepared to do a little more than he is asked to do, without watching the clock to ascertain how much overtime he can charge. In proportion as he does this he lessens the morality of work, and, quite apart from liis attitude towards his employer, he weakens his own character. As Browning has so happily put it: Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Else what's a Heaven for? J It is just that '"reach" that so many men ignore, being satisfied with the imI' mediate "grasp," and not striving the little best that will make them inevit- ! ably better. There is a story of an American workman who was shovelling earth into a cart, and when the noonday whistle went Jiis shovelful of earth was a third of the way to the cart, and sooner than complete the distance in his own time he dropped the shovel. The incident, apocryphal as it may be, is an illuminative commentary of what is far too often the attitude of labor. The man who thinks too much of his own time thinks too little of his employer's. We are not suggesting that the laborer is not worthy of his hire, but it is hard I to draw the line as to exactly when the laborer's responsibility ends, and the employer's begins, and character goes hand-in-hand with nature in abhorring a straight line. As Hope said to the disheartened Glav in "Soldiers of Fortune," ~'W e do not like men because they build railroads or because they are Primt Ministers. We like them for what they are themselves, and 'themselves' is only a reflection of their work." „In a democratic country like our own men are esteemed more for what they do than for what they are doing, and it is immaterial whether they are clad in dungarees or frock coats. Our busy life has little time for social distinctions and the snobbery of caste. In fact, some of our Prime Ministers have been Village Blacksmiths, and so long as they could look the whole world in the face it has mattered little to us wuether their ambition was nurtured at the forge or in tiie library. The man who is not superior to such a consideration has no part in a community ■which is essentially concerned more with results than with methods. Elaborating his subject, Mr. Liddell made a strong plea for cleanliness of speech and purity of action'in the work-room, as necessary concomitants in the building of character. Obscenity and profanity, drink and sensuality, he selected as the greatest enemies of honest labor, and the full and proper fruition of life. A man's outside life should be what his home life is, and the speaker's test that a man should do nothing or say nothin" outside his own domestic circle that he would not say within its sheltering arms, is an old one and a sound one. Tliis has a very strong bearing on the nobility of work, for the drunkard can never give of his best and the libertine robs the sum total of his own labor and the world's labor by just the amount of energy that he expends in licentiousness. Grapes, however, can be gathered from thorns if only the thorns are properly grafted. And in this connection the workroom calls for the exercise of charity and forbearance, for it is only by the process of "give and take" that work is made at all endurable. The speaker closed a thoughtful address by an appeal for the highest respect to womanhood. This may seem to be beside the question in discussing tlie heroism of labor, but the whole course of history has shown "that the clean-living man has made the best statesman, the best soldier, the best sailor and the best ■laborer. This is no country for the Lotos life, when men may ask. ''Why should we only toil who are the roof and crown of things?" and sigh to be lapped in idleness upon Elysian shores. A man who does his work, not as merely work but as a portion ot his life, to be regarded quite as conscientiously as his domesticity or his pleasures, will find that work tin? easiest. While the particular address to which we have been referring may have bad a prevailing basis of truism, it was also pregnant with suggestion and wilh a simple faith in the value of honest labor.