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Essays on Work and Culture by Hamilton Wright Mabie
page 29 of 97 (29%)
peoples who trust to what may be called geographical luck for a living
often develop strong individual qualities and traits, but they never
develop a high degree of social or political organisation, nor do they
produce literature and art. The native force of imagination which some
semi-civilised races seem to possess never becomes creative until it is
developed and directed by training. Education is as essential to greatness
of achievement in any field as the possession of gifts of genius. An
untrained race, like an untrained man, is always at an immense
disadvantage, not only in the competition of the world, but in the working
out of individual destiny. The necessity for work is so far from being a
penalty that it must be counted the highest moral opportunity open to men,
and, therefore, one of the divinest gifts offered to the race. The
apparent freedom of nomadic peoples is seen, upon closer view, to be a
very hard and repulsive bondage; the apparent servitude of working peoples
is seen to be, upon closer view, an open road to freedom.

There is no real freedom save that which is based upon discipline. The
chance to do as one pleases is not liberty, as so many people imagine;
liberty involves knowledge, self-mastery, capacity for exertion, power of
resistance. Emerson uncovered the fundamental conception when he declared
that character is our only definition of freedom and power. Now, character
is always the product of an educational process of some kind; its
production involves tests, trials, temptations, toils. It does not
represent innocence, but that which is higher and more difficult of
attainment, virtue. Innocence is the starting-point in life; virtue is the
goal. Between these two points lies that arduous education which is
effected, for most men, chiefly by and through work. In comparison with
the field, the shop, the factory, the mine, and the sea, the school has
educated a very inconsiderable number; the vast majority of the race have
been trained by toil. On the farm, in the innumerable factories, in
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