Some years ago, a poem created a furore over the whole civilised world, from Canada to the islands of Polynesia. The author of this poem, Edwin Markham, was inspired by Millet's simple and wonderful picture, _The Man with the Hoe_. An agricultural labourer with bowed back stands there, one hand folded on the other, supported on the handle of the hoe. Millet in him has eternalised the expression so often observed in old workmen, especially in those who are worn out by day labour. The man's face is empty, says nothing, every human aspect has disappeared; we only see in his face the look of the patient beast of burden. For while moderate work ennobles the animal in man, immoderate work kills humanity in the beast. Millet's picture was to the poet, who was once himself a slave to bodily labor, a revelation, the eternal artistic type of the generation of man bowed down from childhood under the yoke of labour. In one strophe after another of that finely conceived poem he pictures this being that does not sorrow, and never hopes, his destroyed soul for which Plato and the Pleiades, the sunrise and the rose, all the treasures of mind and nature, are nothing. The poet asks sovereigns, masters, and governors how they will restore to this thing a soul, how they will give it music and dreams. What, he asks, will become of the people who have made this being what it is now; when after a thousand years' silence God's terrible question is answered,--What has become of his soul. Many such employers of labour go to church, they hear explanations of texts like these, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto ... even the least of these, ... ye did it unto me. All that ye wish others should do to you, that do to them." It does not occur to them to think how Jesus, the most inconsiderate of men, at the right place, would have characterised their demands to have small children employed in glass works at ten years of age. It never occurs to them to ask whether they would like to see their own children in these factories or others like them.