t, you get all;
without that, your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade measures,
your institutions of science, are all in vain. It is useless to put your
heads together, if you can't put your hearts together. Shoulder to
shoulder, right hand to right hand, among yourselves, and no wrong hand
to anybody else, and you'll win the world yet.

II. Then, secondly, wise work is USEFUL. No man minds, or ought to mind,
its being hard, if only it comes to something; but when it is hard, and
comes to nothing; when all our bees' business turns to spiders'; and
for honeycomb we have only resultant cobweb, blown away by the next
breeze--that is the cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask
ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our work is coming to
anything or not? We don't care to keep what has been nobly done; still
less do we care to do nobly what others would keep; and, least of all,
to make the work itself useful instead of deadly to the doer, so as to
use his life indeed, but not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest
waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in
the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child had
got down before you; and that he and the cat were at play together, and
that he had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up,
you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if,
instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with
human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with--the devil to
play with; and you yourself the player; and instead of leaving that
golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the
dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend
to lick up--that is no waste! What! you perhaps think, 'to waste the
labour of men is not to kill them.' Is it not? I should like to know how
you could kill them more utterly--kill them with second deaths, seventh
deaths, hundredfold deaths? It is the slightest way of killing to stop a
man's breath. Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the little whistling
bullets--our love-messengers between nation and nation--have brought
pleasant messages from us to many a man before now; orders of sweet
release, and leave at last to go where he will be most welcome and most
happy. At the worst you do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt his
life. But if you put him to base labour, if you bind his thoughts,