there is one that seems to deserve a good deal of respect. It is the fact that for ages labour had been despised, and the labourer degraded, to be a mere chattel of others, not his own man. Charles Ham recalls this fact very often, and every one who writes on education through work recalls it. For at every point he is reminded of it as of a blight that destroyed a great seed field. "For ages," said Horace Mann (whom Ham quotes), "the labour of the world has been done by ignorant men—by classes doomed to ignorance from sire to son—by the bondsmen and bondswomen of the Jews, by the helots of Sparta, by the villeins and slaves of modern times. …" These were never free men in any real sense, and so their power halted at the projection of mere limbs and organs. It halted before it reached the projection of vital function, before it reached the outskirts of the kingdom of will—that is, motive power and all its possibilities. It was a pretty halting place, and a safe one. The workers strewed it with flowers. They decked it with ornament. It is wonderful to see the delicacy of the work—also its radiance, its beauty and exuberance. It is the work of a glad and gifted child free in a garden, bathed in morning light, sweet with the perfume of young flowers and holding still the
