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Number 10. ah ـــــــــــــعـــــــــــ ܫܦܝܚܫܚ a r as gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it; and it is physically impossible that one class should do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk to the workman about the honourableness of manual labour and gan amganges/Nov/* Mae the dignity of humanity. "That is a grand old proverb of Sancho Panza's, Fine words butter no parsnips'; and I can tell you that, all over England just now, you workmen are buying a great deal too much butter at that dairy. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding a collier's helm in a gale on a lee shore, or whirling white-hot iron at a furnace mouth, is not, the same man at the end of his day, or night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or painting pictures. If it is any comfort to you to be told that the rough work is the more honourable of the two, I should be sorry to take that much of consolation from you; and in some sense I need not. events real, honest, and, generally, though not The rough work is at all always, useful; while the fine work is, a great deal of it, foolish and false, as well as fine, and therefore dishonourable: but when both kinds are equally well and worthily done the head's is the noble work, and the hand's the ignoble ; and of all hand work whatsoever, necessary for the maintenance of life, those old words, “In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread, indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of Calamity; and that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also some shadow of degradation into our contest with its thorn and its thistle; so that all nations have held their days honourable, or 'holy," and constituted them holydays, or "holidays,' by making them days of rest; and the promise, which, among all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief brightness over RUSKIN ON WORK. 499 TT- As a am rur death, is that blessing of the dead who die in the Lord, that they rest from their labours, and their works do follow them.' And thus the perpetual question and confest must arise, who is to do this rough work P and how is the worker of it to be comforted, redeemed, and rewarded ? and what kind of play should he have, and what rest, in this world, sometimes, as well as in the next P Well, my good working friends, these questions will take a little time to answer yet. They must be answered: all good men arc occupied with them, and all honest thinkers. There's grand head work doing about them; but much must be discovered, and much attempted in vain, before anything decisive can be told you. Only note these few particulars, which are already sure. As to the distribution of the hard work. None of us, or very few of us, do either hard or soft work because we think we ought ; but because we have chanced to fall into the way of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now, nobody docs anything well that they cannot help doing : work is only done well when it is done with a will; and no man has a thoroughly sound will unless he knows he is doing what he should, and is in his place. And, depend upon it, all work must be done at last, not in a disorderly, scrambling, doggish way, but in an ordered, Men are enlisted for the labout that kills- the labour of war: they are counted, trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that. Let them be enlisted also for the labour that feeds : let them soldierly, human way--a lawful way. be counted, trained, fed, dressed, praised for that. Teach the plough exercise as carefully as you do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops of death ; and all is done : but neither this, nor any other right thing, can be accomplished-you can't even see your way to it-unless, first of all, both servait and master are resolved that, come what will of it, they will do each other iustice.