laboriosity

It is a hard thing to be obliged to lay bare the nakedness of our own father-land, and feel ourselves compelled to confess that a foreign people, whom we had long looked down upon with contempt, making slighting mention occasionally, now of their minute laboriosity, now of their mad extravagance, have stolen a march upon us even in our most beloved paths, and cropped, as Pindar says, the tips of all the virtues from before us.