You may leave your millions to your son, but have you really given him anything? You cannot transfer to him the discipline, the experience, the power which the acquisition has given you; you cannot transfer the delight of achieving, the joy felt only in growth, the pride of acquisition, the character which trained habits of accuracy, method, promptness, patience, dispatch, honesty of dealing, and politeness of manner have developed. You cannot transfer the skill, the sagacity, the prudence, the foresight, which lie concealed in your wealth. It meant a great deal for you, but means nothing to your heir. In climbing to your fortune you developed the muscle, the stamina, and the strength which enabled you to maintain your lofty position, to keep your millions intact. You had the power which comes only from experience and which alone enables you to stand firm on your dizzy height. Your fortune was experience to you, joy, growth, discipline, and character; to him it will be a temptation, an anxiety which will probably dwarf him. It was wings to you, but it will be a dead weight to him; it was education to you and expansion of your highest powers, but to him it may mean inaction, lethargy, indolence, weakness, ignorance. You have taken the priceless spur, — necessity, — away from him, the spur which has goaded man to nearly all the great achievements in the history of the world.

You thought it a kindness to deprive yourself in order that your son might begin where you left off. You thought to spare him the drudgery, the hardships, the deprivations, the lack of opportunities, the meagre education which you had. But you have put a crutch into his hand instead of a staff; you have taken away from him the incentive to self-development, to self-elevation, to self -discipline, and self-help, without which no real success, no real happiness, no great character is ever possible. His enthusiasm will evaporate, his energy will be dissipated, and his ambition, not being stimulated by the struggle for self-elevation, will gradually die away. If you do everything for your son except to inculcate habits of work you have left undone the one thing that can preserve him from being a weakling for life.

Labor is the great schoolmaster of the race. It is the grand drill in life's army without which we are only confused and powerless when called into action.

"Work,'' says Dean Farrar, “is the best birthright which man still retains. It is the strongest of moral tonics, the most vigorous of mental medicines. All nature shows us something analogous to this. The standing pool stagnates into pestilence; the running stream is pure. The very earth we tread on, the very air we breathe, would be unwholesome but for the agitating forces of the wind and sea. In the balmy and enervating regions where the summer of the broad belts of the world furnishes man in prodigal luxuriance with the means of life, he sinks into a despicable and nerveless lassitude; but he is at his noblest and his best in those regions where he has to wrestle with the great forces of nature for his daily bread.”

"Thank God every morning when you get up," cried Charles Kingsley, "that you have something to do that day which must be done whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance, self-control, diligence, strength of will, content, and a hundred other virtues which the idle never know."

What but our hard habits of work, generation after generation, has given stability and meaning to our national life? It has been the salvation of our poorer classes. It has saved thousands of premature deaths, especially by suicide.

“Let a broken man cling to his work," urged Beecher; "if it saves nothing else it will save him."

"How often have I found myself in a state of despondency, with a feeling of depression," exclaimed Professor Virchow, of Berlin. "What has saved me is the habit of work, which has not forsaken me even in the days of outward misfortune, — the habit of scientific work which has always appeared to me as a recreation, even after wearying and useless efforts in political, social, and religious matters."

"Labor is nature's physician," said Galon, the famous Greek physician.

"It is one of the precious compensations of hard work," says Matthews, "that there is a vis medicatrix, a healing power in it, which is a sovereign remedy for ailments both physical and moral. How often great trials are robbed of their sting by the interest and excitement of an engrossing occupation! But against imaginary grievances, — against hypochondria, low spirits, and ennui, — it is a coat of mail. Who, it has been well asked, ever knew a man wretched in his energy? A soldier in the full height of his courage and in the heat of contest is not conscious of a wound. An orator, in the full flow of his 'ignited logic,' is altogether exempt from the pitiful ness of rheumatism or the gout. To be occupied — what, indeed, is it? Is it not, literally, to be possessed as by a tenant? When the occupancy is complete, there can be no entrance for any evil spirit. But idleness is emptiness; and, where that is, the doors of the soul are thrown wide open, and the devils of discontent, ennui and melancholy troop in, ' not in single spies, but in battalions,' and, once in, they cannot be easily dislodged."

“I have found my greatest happiness in labor," said Gladstone, when nearing four score and ten. "I early formed the habit of industry, and it has been its own reward. The young are apt to think that rest means a cessation from all effort, but I have found the most perfect rest in changing effort. If brain-weary over books and study go out into the blessed sunlight and the pure air and give heartfelt exercise to the body. The brain will soon become calm and rested. The efforts of nature are ceaseless. Even in our sleep the heart throbs on. If these great forces ceased for an instant, death would follow. I try to live close to nature and to imitate her in my labors. The compensation is sound sleep, a wholesome digestion, and powers that are kept at their best; and this, I take it, is the chief reward of industry.”

Bismarck urged hard work as the only safeguard for a true life. A few years before his death, when asked for a rule of life which would be simply stated and easily recommended, he said; "There is one word which expresses this rule, this gospel, — work; without work, life is empty, useless, and unhappy. No man can be happy who does not work. To the youth on the threshold of life I have not one word, but three words of advice to offer, — ‘work, work, work!'"

"Labor is everlastingly noble and holy," says Carlyle; "it is the source of all perfection; no man can accomplish, or become accomplished, without work; it is the purifying fire burning up the poisoning and corrupting influences emasculating the manhood of the soul." "Work is the grand cure for all maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind," continues the sage of Chelsea. “There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man who honestly and earnestly works; in idleness alone is there perpetual despair." "All true work is sacred; in all true work, were it but true hand labor, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven." "Work is worship! He that understands this well understands the prophecy of the whole future; it is the last evangel, which has included all others." "Two men I honor, and no third. First, the toil-worn craftsman, that with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard hand. A second man I honor, and still more highly; him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the Bread of Life. If the poor and humble toil that we may have food must not the high and glorious toil for him in return that we have light, have guidance, freedom, immortality? These two in all their degrees I honor; all else is chaff and dust."