l consisted of one small
calabash of rice, there lived a heart richer than _Laissez-faire_:
they, with a royal munificence, boiled their rice for him; they sang
all night to him, spinning assiduous on their cotton distaffs, as he
lay to sleep: "Let us pity the poor white man; no mother has he to
fetch him milk, no sister to grind him corn!" Thou poor black Noble
One,--thou _Lady_ too: did not a God make thee too; was there not in
thee too something of a God!--

* * * * *

Gurth, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, has been greatly pitied by
Dryasdust and others. Gurth, with the brass collar round his neck,
tending Cedric's pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I call an
exemplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the sky above him, with
the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and in him at
least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home;
Gurth to me seems happy, in comparison with many a Lancashire and
Buckinghamshire man of these days, not born thrall of anybody! Gurth's
brass collar did not gall him: Cedric _deserved_ to be his master. The
pigs were Cedric's, but Gurth too would get his parings of them. Gurth
had the inexpressible satisfaction of feeling himself related
indissolubly, though in a rude brass-collar way, to his fellow-mortals
in this Earth. He had superiors, inferiors, equals.--Gurth is now
'emancipated' long since; has what we call 'Liberty.' Liberty, I am
told, is a divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the 'Liberty to die
by starvation' is not so divine!

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his
finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk
thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able
for; and then by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set
about doing of the same! That is his true blessedness, honour,
'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing: if liberty be not that, I for one
have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to
leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and
keep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices!
Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable
madman: his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every
wiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper
way, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him
to go