And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter.  You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him.  You cannot make both.  Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.  If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.  All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves.  All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act.  The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last—­a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity.  On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool.  Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once.  Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause:  but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.  And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.

And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished.  Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel.  Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly.  Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek.  Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free.  But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the worm’s work on it, is to see God,[158] into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with,—­this it is to be slave-masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.