our own child?' Then you may ask
Justice, in an amazed manner, 'How she can possibly be so foolish as to
think children could sweep crossings with feathers on their heads?' Then
you stoop again, and Justice says--still in her dull, stupid way--'Then,
why don't you, every other Sunday, leave your child to sweep the
crossing, and take the little sweeper to church in a hat and feather?'
Mercy on us (you think), what will she say next? And you answer, of
course, that 'you don't, because every body ought to remain content in
the position in which Providence has placed them.' Ah, my friends,
that's the gist of the whole question. _Did_ Providence put them in that
position, or did _you_? You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell
him to remain content in the 'position in which Providence has placed
him.' That's modern Christianity. You say--'_We_ did not knock him into
the ditch.' How do you know what you have done, or are doing? That's
just what we have all got to know, and what we shall never know, until
the question with us every morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing,
but how to do the just thing; nor until we are at least so far on the
way to being Christian, as to have understood that maxim of the poor
half-way Mahometan, 'One hour in the execution of justice is worth
seventy years of prayer.'

Supposing, then, we have it determined with appropriate justice, _who_
is to do the hand work, the next questions must be how the hand-workers
are to be paid, and how they are to be refreshed, and what play they are
to have. Now, the possible quantity of play depends on the possible
quantity of pay; and the quantity of pay is not a matter for
consideration to hand-workers only, but to all workers. Generally, good,
useful work, whether of the hand or head, is either ill-paid, or not
paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but it always is so. People,
as a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, not for being
served. Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to
your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head
work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you
think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter
bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science,
the man who discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid
with a dungeon; the man who invented the microscope, and first saw
earth, died of starva