Excerpt from Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, Vol. 52: May 1865 He is a good illustration of what our noble land can do for its humblest children. N 0 man is so poor, or so ignorant, that a blessing may not rest on his household. The child of the lowly and of the exile, can gain an education free as the air, and good as that which victoria can give her titled children, with the treasury of her kingdom at her command. The sons of coal heavers and porters become millionaires. The store boy of one generation becomes the princely merchant of the next. The glory of a nation is not its palaces, its luxury, its gold and silver and precious stones, its marble halls, its statuary and paintings. It is in intelligent toil, which is the charm of life, in its thousands workshops, in its marts of trade, in the moral rank of mechanical labor. By these, cities rise - schools, those hiding places of a nation's power, abound - colleges grace the land - churches bless the people - enduring prosperity covers all the habitations of those whose walls are salvation and whose gates are praise. N o nation can be tranquil, and no man blest, without employment. The nations who rule the world are marked by intelligent industry. England is calleda nation of shopkeepers, but on her domain the sun never sets. When Dr. J ohn son expressed his hate of Scotland, because the men and the horses ate the same food, it was signifibantly asked him Where he could find better men or better horses. Where spicy breezes blow softly over the land, and the fruits of the earth come forth without the sweat of labor, there man is vile. The noblest men of our nation have laid the foundation of their fame and usefulness in the early toil that made their bodies rugged and gave them independence of soul. Washington blest the discipline that attended his early career as a surveyor. Franklin educated himself at the printing press, and amid the daily work of a laborious trade. It was worth sending a letter to France to tell the then Minister at St. Cloud, that his son, john quincy, was going to be a man as he rode post to Boston from Braintree with the mail, and did it well. Webster was never ashamed of the log cabin' home of his mother, so far on the frontier that the smoke of no white man's hut stood between it and the Canadian line. He never tired of tell ing of his first investment of the little money earned by hard work with which he bought of a roving peddler a cotton handkerchief, on which was printed the Constitution of the United States - nor how in that home, too poor to allow a candle, he sought out the best pitch knot on the farm, and by its light, as he lay on the hearth, he committed that wonderful instru ment to memory. I followed in his wake on his last eastern tour when he sought the little town of Fryburgh, in the State of Maine, to look once more on those town records that he, in his early days, wrote with his own hand to eke out a scanty living. Of those memorials of his early re solute purpose to rise he was justly as proud as of any speech or paper that commands the admiration of the world. With the noble army of self made men, Mr. Lincoln was not ashamed to array himself. He took no pains to hide his humble birth, or the struggles with ignorance and poverty that attended his upward steps. In 1860, he was in New York. He visited one of the missions at Five Points, and made an address. He detailed his poverty and early struggles, the principles on which he had acted, how success had attended, And now children, said he, I am a lawyer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com