ich, you know is paid for by hard labourer's work in the furrow
and furnace. A costly game!--not to speak of its consequences; I will
say at present nothing of these. The mere immediate cost of all these
plays is what I want you to consider; they all cost deadly work
somewhere, as many of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight
fails over the diamonds; the weaver, whose arm fails over the web; the
iron-forger, whose breath fails before the furnace--_they_ know what
work is--they, who have all the work, and none of the play, except a
kind they have named for themselves down in the black north country,
where 'play' means being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty example for
philologists, of varying dialect, this change in the sense of the word
'play,' as used in the black country of Birmingham, and the red and
black country of Baden Baden. Yes, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, of
England, who think 'one moment unamused a misery, not made for feeble
man,' this is what you have brought the word 'play' to mean, in the
heart of merry England! You may have your fluting and piping; but there
are sad children sitting in the market-place, who indeed cannot say to
you, 'We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced:' but eternally
shall say to you, 'We have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.'

This, then, is the first distinction between the 'upper and lower'
classes. And this is one which is by no means necessary; which indeed
must, in process of good time, be by all honest men's consent abolished.
Men will be taught that an existence of play, sustained by the blood of
other creatures, is a good existence for gnats and sucking fish; but not
for men: that neither days, nor lives, can be made holy by doing nothing
in them: that the best prayer at the beginning of a day is that we may
not lose its moments; and the best grace before meat, the consciousness
that we have justly earned our dinner. And when we have this much of
plain Christianity preached to us again, and enough respect for what we
regard as inspiration, as not to think that 'Son, go work to-day in my
vineyard,' means 'Fool, go play to-day in my vineyard,' we shall all be
workers, in one way or another; and this much at least of the
distinction between 'upper' and 'lower' forgotten.

II. I pass then to our second distinction; between the rich and poor,
between Dives and Lazarus,--distinction which exists more sternly, I
suppose, in this day, than ever in the