recognize the heroic only when it sees
it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see
it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.
It is with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your
college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar
of Russia's court. But, instinctively, we make a combination of two
things in judging the total significance of a human being. We feel it
to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be
calculated) of his inner virtue _and_ his outer place,--neither singly
taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning for
life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They
_must_ be significant elements of the world as well.

Just test Tolstoi's deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts.
This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer
in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the
spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to
belong:--

"The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are grown
men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell
to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each
day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular
strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under
peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no
reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a
'reserve price.' We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent
hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as
hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting
this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our
labor.

"Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly
get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is
secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He
has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us
all when the debris is cleared away. In the mean time he must get from
us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and
collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to
exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not
be the loser; for the market would soon supp