The man surveyed me in silence for a moment; then he said slowly, “Mean ter say yer like crackin’ these blamed stones to fill ’oles some other fool’s made?” I nodded. “Well, that beats everything. Now, I ’_ave_ seen better days; worked in a big brewery over near Maidstone—a town that, and something doing; and now, ’ere I am, ’ammering me ’eart out on these blasted stones for a bit o’ bread and a pipe o’ baccy once a week—it ain’t good enough.” He pulled a blackened clay from his pocket and began slowly filling it with rank tobacco; then he lit it carefully behind his battered hat, put the spent match back in his pocket, rose to his feet, hitched his braces, and, with a silent nod to me, went on to his job. Why do we give these tired children, whose minds move slowly, whose eyes are holden that they cannot read the Book, whose hearts are full of sore resentment against they know not what, such work as this to do—hammering their hearts out for a bit of bread? All the pathos of unreasoning labour rings in these few words. We fit the collar on unwilling necks; and when their service is over we bid them go out free; but we break the good Mosaic law and send them away empty. What wonder there is so little willing service, so few ears ready to be thrust through against the master’s door. The swift stride of civilisation is leaving behind individual effort, and turning man into the Dæmon of a machine. To and fro in front of the long loom, lifting a lever at either end, paces he who once with painstaking intelligence drove the shuttle. _Then_ he tasted the joy of completed work, that which his eye had looked upon, and his hands had handled; now his work is as little finished as the web of Penelope. Once the reaper grasped the golden corn stems, and with dexterous sweep of sickle set free the treasure of the earth. Once the creatures of the field were known to him, and his eye caught the flare of scarlet and blue as the frail poppies and sturdy corn-cockles laid down their beauty at his feet; now he sits serene on Juggernaut’s car, its guiding Dæmon, and the field is silent to him. As with the web and the grain so with the wood and stone in the treasure-house of our needs. The ground was accursed _for our sake_ that in the sweat of our brow we might eat bread. Now the many live in the brain-sweat of the few; and it must be so, for as little as great King Cnut could stay the sea until it had reached the appointed place, so little can we raise a barrier to the wave of progress, and say, “Thus far and no further shalt thou come.”