ly him with others to take
our places.

"We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,--that we have sold our
labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it
where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and he must get all
the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we
shall part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to
us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility
of labor. We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of
interest with our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility,
none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding
toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at
the end.

"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no
certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves,
we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be
driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.

"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren,
hopeless lives."

And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which
one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it
because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his
polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is
it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible,
and we extol them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been
reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery
to a task, the loss of finer pleasures?

Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude,
and are always counted to its credit,--read the records of missionary
devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then,
taken by itself,--no, nor all of them together,--that make such a life
undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do
the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures.
Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was
too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.

If there _were_ any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what
made them different from the rest? It can only have been this,--that
their souls worked and end