Yet the method by which we may love him is quite simple; it is to
approach him not with judgment but compassion, to put ourselves in his
place, to see his life from his point of view instead of our own. What
is his ignorance after all but lack of opportunity? What are his bad
manners but the penalty of a narrow life? What are these habits of his
which so offend me but things inevitable in that condition of servitude
which he occupies--a servitude, let me recollect, which ministers to my
ease and comfort? To-day, not less than in earlier generations,
society resembles the palaces of the Italian Renaissance,--the feast of
life in the painted hall, and the groaning of the prisoner in the
depths below. For every comfort that I have, some one has sweated. My
fire is lit not only with coal from the mine, but with the miner's
flesh and blood; my food has come through roaring seas in which men
perished by hurricane and shipwreck; the very books from which I draw
my culture are the product not alone of the scholar and the thinker,
but of rude unlettered men in forest and at forge who helped to make
them by their toil. If I were as educated as I claim to be I should
know myself debtor to the barbarian as truly as to the Greek, and as I
read my book I should see the forest falling that it might be woven
into paper, and men labouring in the heat of factories that the moulded
metal might become the organ of intelligence.
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