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,[158]
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.

And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral
front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the
old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless
monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at
them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who
struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being,
such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it
must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her
children.

Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily
this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any
other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere
into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which
they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry
against wealth, and against nobility, is not forced from them either by
the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride. These do much,
and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were
never yet shaken as they are at this day. 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. Never ha