It was one of the chief characteristics of the Roman people in the time of their greatness that their most successful generals were content to return to the plough after their wars were over.  Thus Pliny in his “Natural History” remarks as follows:  “Then were the fields cultivated by the hands of the generals themselves, and the earth rejoiced, tilled as it was by a 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 of Wordsworth’s “Happy Warrior”: 

     “Who, doomed to go in company with pain,
      And fear, and bloodshed—­miserable train!—­
      Turns his necessity to glorious gain.”