der Springer's Labor...and the greates of these is Labor

[alice wellintown]

To how many things our lives have been compared!—to a voyage, with its
storms and adverse currents and safe haven at last; to a day with its
morning, noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring, summer,
autumn, and winter; to a game, a school, a battle.

In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game
of chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each
piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it
successfully. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the
phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the
laws of26 nature. But it may be questioned if the comparison is a
happy one. Life is not a game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or
a contest for victory over an opponent, except in isolated episodes
now and then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery of life.
Life is a day's work, a struggle where the forces to be used and the
forces to be overcome are much more vague and varied and intangible
than are those of the chessboard. Life is coöperation with other
lives. We win when we help others to win. I suppose business is more
often like a game than is life—your gain is often the other man's
loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your rivals and competitors.
But in a sane, normal life there is little that suggests a game of any
kind.

We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the three
things—money, goods, labor—and the greatest of these is labor. Labor
is the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requires
to produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce,
the latter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the
hoe and in the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from
nature what we all must have, and these things are none of them in the
hands or under the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us
from obtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from
us.

The chess simile has only a rhetorical value.27 The London workingmen
to whom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in their
problems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitful
suggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen,
artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew through
experience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many
persons who succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the
forces and conditions with which they have to deal, as two
chess-players have of the pawns and knights and bishops and queens of
the chessboard?

Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was
vastly more logical force in his figures than in those of most
writers.

Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in a
mountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming and
noisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and then
its placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the life
that is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself to
many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a
destructive force.

XI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Burroughs