“That is all clerks are fit for,” said a heartless woman, who had been diverting herself with turning a store full of goods topsy-turvy.

Is it?

Is the situation of a clerk always a congenial one? Have those who occupy it never a soul above ribbons and laces? Are they as frivolous, and mindless as many of the ladies upon whom they are often obliged to wait? Is their future bounded by the counter to which necessity has chained them?

Not at all.

Look into our library reading-rooms of an evening. See them joining the French, Spanish, German, and Italian classes. See them, unconscious of the flight of time, devouring with avidity works of history, biography, and books of travel. See the eye sparkle, and the brow flush, as they read how a Greeley shut his teeth on discouragement, and hewed out with his unaided arm a path to honor and usefulness. Ah! has the clerk no noble, hopes or aspirations for the future, which the grinding, treadmill round of his daily toil can neither smother nor crush out? Is there no far-off home from which he is an unwilling exile? No mother, no sister, whom he must make proud of son and brother? No bright-eyed, winsome young girl, whose image enshrined in his heart is at once a talisman against evil, and a spur to unremitting exertion? the hope of whose love sweetens and dignifies his unpretending labor, nerves him to bear uncomplainingly, unresentfully, the overbearing and undeserved rebuke of arrogant assumption?

You shake your head, and cite sad instances to the contrary. You tell me of dishonest, dissolute, improvident clerks, lost to every just, generous, and noble feeling; who look not beyond the present hour either for soul or body.

True.

But what if, when they entered upon their clerkship they stood alone in the world, uncared for, irresponsible, held in check by no saving home influences, adrift upon the great human life tide? What if their employers looked upon them merely as tools and machines, not as human beings? What if they ground them down to the lowest possible rate of compensation. What if never by look, act, word, or tone, they manifested a kindly parental interest in their future, cared not what company they kept, or what influences surrounded them in their leisure hours? What if these young men returned at night, after their day’s meagerly rewarded toil, to a small, dreary, desolate, comfortless, lodging room, where there was nothing to cheer the eye or rest the heart? What if the syren voice of sin softly whispered those youthful, restless, craving hearts away?

What then?

Oh! if employers sometimes thought of this! Sometimes stopped the Juggernaut wheels of Mammon to look at the victims which lay crushed beneath, for want of a little human love, and care, and sympathy! Sometimes thought, while looking with fond pride upon their own young sons, that fortune’s wheel, in some of its thousand revolutions, might whirl them through the same fiery ordeal, and that their now unclouded sun might go down while it was yet day.

You, who are employers, think of it!

Youth hungers for appreciation—sympathy—must have it—ought to have it—will have it. Oh, give it an occasional thought whether the source from whence it is obtained be good or evil, pure or impure! Speak kindly to them.

Oh, the saving power there is in feeling that there is one human being who cares whether we stand or fall!