mes
hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he
makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking
being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a
machine before, an animated tool.

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must
either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make
both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be
precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that
precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like
cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must
unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make
cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must
go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be
bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the
invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err
from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the
whole human being be lost at last--a heap of sawdust, so far as its
intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart,
which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after
the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if
you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool.
Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth
doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all
his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame,
failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole
majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the
clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark,
there will be transfiguration behind and within them.

And now, reader, look round 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 of it 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