Chapter XLII: Section XLI

Labor.—Effect Of The Esteem In Which It Is Held.

As civilization advances, labor becomes more honorable. All barbarous nations despise it as slavish. _Pigrum et iners videtur sudore adquirere quod possis sanguine parare_: has been the motto of all medieval times. In heathen Iceland, the owner of a piece of land might be deprived of it by an adversary who could overpower him in single combat. This mode of acquisition was considered more honorable than purchase. It was Thor’s own form of investiture. The ideas of the Romans on rightful acquisition may be inferred from the word _mancipium_ (manu capere).(263) Pure Christianity, on the other hand, preached the honorableness of labor from the first (Thess. 4, 11; II. Thess. 3, 8 seq.; Eph. 4, 28). And so in the time of the Reformation,(264) when Christendom was returning to its primitive purity.

In keeping with this is the fact, that the most cultivated nations, and the same may be said of individuals, value time most highly. “Time is money.” (_Benjamin Franklin._) An English proverb calls time the stuff of which life is made.(265) While in negro nations, individuals do not even know their own age; while in Russia, there are very few clocks to strike the hours, even in the towers of churches, in England, a watch is considered an indispensable article of apparel, even for very young people and for some of the lower orders of society.(266) Railroads operate in this respect as a kind of national clock. The introduction of machinery and the more minute division of labor, make punctuality a necessity. While South Americans and West Indians are frightfully careless in their every movement, a carelessness which betrays itself even in their drawling speech,(267) the life of a New Englander has been compared to the rush of a locomotive. In the markets of Central Asia, nothing strikes the European with so much surprise as the little value put upon time by the merchants of India and Bucharia, who are fully satisfied when, after endless waiting, they succeed in obtaining a somewhat higher price for their wares.(268)