classes of Europe to the surrounding aspects
of suffering, uncleanness, and crime, binds them not only into one
responsibility with the sin, but into one dishonour with the foulness,
which rot at their thresholds. The crimes daily recorded in the
police-courts of London and Paris (and much more those which are
_un_recorded) are a disgrace to the whole body politic;[55] they are, as
in the body natural, stains of disease on a face of delicate skin,
making the delicacy itself frightful. Similarly, the filth and poverty
permitted or ignored in the midst of us are as dishonourable to the
whole social body, as in the body natural it is to wash the face, but
leave the hands and feet foul. Christ's way is the only true one: begin
at the feet; the face will take care of itself.

109. Yet, since necessarily, in the frame of a nation, nothing but the
head can be of gold, and the feet, for the work they have to do, must be
part of iron, part of clay;--foul or mechanical work is always reduced
by a noble race to the minimum in quantity; and, even then, performed
and endured, not without sense of degradation, as a fine temper is
wounded by the sight of the lower offices of the body. The highest
conditions of human society reached hitherto have cast such work to
slaves; but supposing slavery of a politically defined kind to be done
away with, mechanical and foul employment must, in all highly organized
states, take the aspect either of punishment or probation. All criminals
should at once be set to the most dangerous and painful forms of it,
especially to work in mines and at furnaces,[56] so as to relieve the
innocent population as far as possible: of merely rough (not mechanical)
manual labour, especially agricultural, _a large portion should be done
by the upper classes_;--_bodily health, and sufficient contrast and
repose for the mental functions, being unattainable without it_; what
necessarily inferior labour remains to be done, as especially in
manufactures, should, and always will, when the relations of society are
reverent and harmonious, fall to the lot of those who, for the time, are
fit for nothing better. For as, whatever the perfectness of the
educational system, there must remain infinite differences between the
natures and capacities of men; and these differing natures are generally
rangeable under the two qualities of lordly, (or tending towards rule,
construction, and harmony), and servile (or tending towards misrule