Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 205, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1916 — Manhood Alone Is What Counts [ARTICLE]

Manhood Alone Is What Counts

By J. G. HOLLAND.

Labor, calling, profession, scholarship and artificial and arbitrary distinctions of all sorts, are incidents and accidents of life and pass away. It is only manhood that remains, and it is only by manhood that man is to be measured. When this proposition shall be comprehended and accepted, it will become easy to sec that there is no such thing as menial work in this world. No work that God sets a man to do —no work to which God has specially adapted a man's powers—can properly be called either menial or mean. The man who blacks your boots and blacks them well, and who engages in that variety of labor because he can do it better than he can do anything else, may have, if he choose, just as sound and true a manhood as you have, not only after he gets through the work of his life, but now, with your boots in one hand and your shilling in the other. There is very much dirtier work done in politics and sometimes in the professions, than that of blacking boots; work, too, which destroys manhood, or renders its acquisition impossible.