ves? It
is something if we do not detest him; if we tolerate him it should be
counted to us for a virtue.

Yet the method by which we may love him is quite simple; it is to
approach him not with judgment but compassion, to put ourselves in his
place, to see his life from his point of view instead of our own. What
is his ignorance after all but lack of opportunity? What are his bad
manners but the penalty of a narrow life? What are these habits of his
which so offend me but things inevitable in that condition of servitude
which he occupies--a servitude, let me recollect, which ministers to my
ease and comfort? To-day, not less than in earlier generations,
society resembles the palaces of the Italian Renaissance,--the feast of
life in the painted hall, and the groaning of the prisoner in the
depths below. For every comfort that I have, some one has sweated. My
fire is lit not only with coal from the mine, but with the miner's
flesh and blood; my food has come through roaring seas in which men
perished by hurricane and shipwreck; the very books from which I draw
my culture are the product not alone of the scholar and the thinker,
but of rude unlettered men in forest and at forge who helped to make
them by their toil. If I were as educated as I claim to be I should
know myself debtor to the barbarian as truly as to the Greek, and as I
read my book I should see the forest falling that it might be woven
into paper, and men labouring in the heat of factories that the moulded
metal might become the organ of intelligence. Nay, I should see yet
more; for would it not appear that these nameless toilers are richer in
essential life, and in the deep knowledge of what man's existence is,
than even the scholar and the writer, whose main acquaintance with life
is with words rather than acts? They toil with tense muscles through
the summer heat and winter cold; they endure hardship and danger; and
week by week their scanty wage is shared by wives and children, who
excite in them tenderness and self-sacrifice, and repay them with
affection and devotion. For it is so decreed that the sacred
magnanimities of the human heart come to flower as fully in lives of
crude labour as in lives of ease; these roughened hands grow gentle
when they touch the heads of little children, on these strong breasts
the wife rests her weariness, and these lips that speak a language so
different from mine have nevertheless known the sacramental wine o