e. They sound in your dreams--those
treadmill steps arousing echoes of bitterness and rebellion. You cannot
escape from yourself. You cannot take a vacation. You may grow rich and
travel far and spend desperately, but the baleful music will follow you to
the end, the music of the work you did in hate. This is the tragedy of
drudgery, not that you spend your time and strength at it, but that you
lose yourself in it.

But at the worst this man is no such poverty-stricken soul as the crank,
the tramp, or the jack-of-all-trades. If his occupation was worth while,
those hated habits are far from deserving hate. If they are habits by which
a man may live, by which one may give a service that other men need and
will pay for, their value is certified from the sternest laboratory. The
drudge has a right to respect himself. He has the right to the respect of
other men and I give mine without reserve. I say that he who holds himself
grimly for life to a useful commonplace work which he hates, is heroic. It
is easy to be heroic on horseback. To be heroic on foot in the dust, lost
in the crowd, with no applause--that is the heroism which has borne up and
carried forward most of the work of civilization.

IV

We honor the drudge, but deplore his fate. And yet there are many who
believe that there is in fact no other fate for any man; that every
business is in the long run a belittling business; that whether you are a
hodcarrier or a poet, as you go on in your calling, "shades of the
prison-house" will close upon you and custom lie upon you "heavy as frost
and deep almost as life."

Let us look at this deep pessimism at its darkest. The imperfect, that is
everywhere. That is all that you can see or work at. That is the warp and
woof of all your occupations and institutions, your politics, your science,
your religion. They are all nearly as bad as they are good. Your science
has forever to disown its past. Your politics demands that you shall be
_particeps criminis_ in its evil as the price of a position in which you
can exert any influence. Your historic church is almost as full of Satan as
of Christ. And when you have spent your bit of life in any of these
institutions or occupations, they are not perfect as you had hoped.

You emancipate the slaves and the negro question still looks you in the
face. You invent printing and then must say with Browning's Fust, "Have I
brought man advantage or hatched so to speak a strange serpen