§ XIII. “And, now, reader, look around this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain, in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards, the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin, which after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with--this it is to be slave masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.” § XV. ” ...It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men.... In all ages and in all countries reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint but rejoicingly; and famine and peril and sword and all evil and all shame have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature prompted and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered with its wheels, and weighted with its hammer strokes--this nature bade not--this God blesses not--this humanity for no long time is able to endure.”