stars are to be thanked for our
safety, whom are we to thank for the danger?

[56] Our politicians, even the best of them, regard only the distress
caused by the _failure_ of mechanical labour. The degradation caused by
its excess is a far more serious subject of thought, and of future fear.
I shall examine this part of our subject at length hereafter. There can
hardly be any doubt, at present, cast on the truth of the above
passages, as all the great thinkers are unanimous on the matter. Plato's
words are terrific in their scorn and pity whenever he touches on the
mechanical arts. He calls the men employed in them not even human, but
partially and diminutively human, "[Greek: anthropiskoi,]" and opposes
such work to noble occupations, not merely as prison is opposed to
freedom but as a convict's dishonoured prison is to the temple (escape
from them being like that of a criminal to the sanctuary); and the
destruction caused by them being of soul no less than body.--_Rep._ vi.
9. Compare _Laws_, v. 11. Xenophon dwells on the evil of occupations at
the furnace and especially their "[Greek: ascholia], want of
leisure."--_Econ._ i. 4. (Modern England, with all its pride of
education, has lost that first sense of the word "school;" and till it
recover that, it will find no other rightly.) His word for the harm to
the soul is to "break" it, as we say of the heart.--_Econ._ i. 6. And
herein, also, is the root of the scorn, otherwise apparently most
strange and cruel, with which Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare always speak
of the populace; for it is entirely true that, in great states, the
lower orders are low by nature as well as by task, being precisely that
part of the commonwealth which has been thrust down for its coarseness
or unworthiness (by coarseness I mean especially insensibility and
irreverence--the "profane" of Horace); and when this ceases to be so,
and the corruption and profanity are in the higher instead of the lower
orders, there arises, first, helpless confusion, then, if the lower
classes deserve power, ensues swift revolution, and they get it; but if
neither the populace nor their rulers deserve it, there follows mere
darkness and dissolution, till, out of the putrid elements, some new
capacity of order rises, like grass on a grave; if not, there is no more
hope, nor shadow of turning, for that nation. Atropos has her way with
it.

So that the law of national health is like that of a great lake or sea,
in