s the mother of invention,
poverty is the creator of the arts. If there had been no poverty, and no
sense of poverty, where would have been that which we call the wealth of
a country? Subtract from civilization all that has been produced by
the poor, and what remains?--the state of the savage. Where you now see
labourer and prince, you would see equality indeed,--the equality of
wild men. No; not even equality there! for there brute force becomes
lordship, and woe to the weak! Where you now see some in frieze, some in
purple, you would see nakedness in all. Where stands the palace and
the cot, you would behold but mud huts and caves. As far as the peasant
excels the king among savages, so far does the society exalted and
enriched by the struggles of labour excel the state in which Poverty
feels no disparity, and Toil sighs for no ease. On the other hand, if
the rich were perfectly contented with their wealth, their hearts
would become hardened in the sensual enjoyments it procures. It is that
feeling, by Divine Wisdom implanted in the soul, that there is vanity
and vexation of spirit in the things of Mammon, which still leaves the
rich man sensitive to the instincts of Heaven, and teaches him to seek
for happiness in those beneficent virtues which distribute his wealth to
the profit of others. If you could exclude the air from the rays of the
fire, the fire itself would soon languish and die in the midst of its
fuel; and so a man's joy in his wealth is kept alive by the air which it
warms; and if pent within itself, is extinguished.

"And this, my brethren, leads me to another view of the vast subject
opened to us by the words of the apostle, 'Every man shall bear his
own burden.' The worldly conditions of life are unequal. Why are they
unequal? O my brethren, do you not perceive? Think you that, if it had
been better for our spiritual probation that there should be neither
great nor lowly, rich nor poor, Providence would not so have ordered
the dispensations of the world, and so, by its mysterious but merciful
agencies, have influenced the framework and foundations of society? But
if from the remotest period of human annals, and in all the numberless
experiments of government which the wit of man has devised, still this
inequality is ever found to exist, may we not suspect that there is
something in the very principles of our nature to which that inequality
is necessary and essential? Ask why this inequality? Why?--as w