Nay, I should see yet
more; for would it not appear that these nameless toilers are richer in
essential life, and in the deep knowledge of what man's existence is,
than even the scholar and the writer, whose main acquaintance with life
is with words rather than acts? They toil with tense muscles through
the summer heat and winter cold; they endure hardship and danger; and
week by week their scanty wage is shared by wives and children, who
excite in them tenderness and self-sacrifice, and repay them with
affection and devotion. For it is so decreed that the sacred
magnanimities of the human heart come to flower as fully in lives of
crude labour as in lives of ease; these roughened hands grow gentle
when they touch the heads of little children, on these strong breasts
the wife rests her weariness, and these lips that speak a language so
different from mine have nevertheless known the sacramental wine of
love. Were my life weighed with theirs might it not appear that theirs
was the richer in essential fortitude, in patience and endurance, in
all the final qualities that compose the finest manhood?
The spirit of compassion interprets these lives to me; it lends me
vision. It enables me to see them not in their artificial disparities,
but in their deep-lying kinship with mine and all other lives.
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