ploughshare crowned with laurels, he who guided the wheel
being himself fresh from glorious victories." And no sooner did honest
hand labour become despised than effeminacy crept in, and this once
haughty nation was practically blotted out from the face of the earth.

Let the Cotswold labourer realise that to work on the land, ploughing
and reaping, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, come weal, come
woe, is no mean destiny for an honest man; there is scope for the
display of a noble and generous spirit in the beautiful green fields as
well as in the smoky atmosphere of the east end of London, in a
Birmingham factory, or a Warrington forge.

"What is the meaning of nobleness?" asks Carlyle. "In a valiant
suffering for others did nobleness ever lie. Every noble crown is, and
on earth will for ever be, a crown of thorns. All true work is sacred.
In all true work, were it but true hand labour, there is something of
divineness. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain,
sweat of the heart; up to that 'agony of bloody sweat' which all men
have called divine. Oh, brother, if this is not worship, then, I say,
the more pity for worship: for this is the noblest thing yet discovered
under God's sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil?
Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow workmen there
in God's eternity surviving those, they alone surviving; peopling, they
alone, the unmeasured solitudes of Time. To thee Heaven, though severe,
is not unkind. Heaven is kind, as a noble mother; as that Spartan
mother, saying, while she gave her son his shield, 'With it, my son, or
upon it, thou, too, shalt return home in honour--to thy far distant home
in honour--doubt it not--if in the battle thou keep thy shield!' Thou in
the eternities and deepest death kingdoms art not an alien; thou
everywhere art a denizen. Complain not; the very Spartans did not
complain."

Would that the toiling labourer in the Cotswolds and in our great smoky
cities might keep these words continually before him, so that he might
grasp, not merely the secret of content and happiness in this life, but
the golden key to the immeasurable blessings of "the sure and certain
hope" of that life which is to come! Then shall he hear the words:

"King, thou wast called Conqueror;
In every battle thou bearest the prize."

Conqueror will he be in life's battle if he follow in the footsteps of
the Spartan of old or