And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors:  examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.

Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly.  It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves.  Their universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride.  These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day.  It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.  It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men.  Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them:  for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it.  I know not if a day is ever to come when the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery.  It is often the best kind of liberty,—­liberty from care.  The man who says to one, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh,[159] has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him.  The movements of the one are hindered by the burden on his shoulder; of the other, by the bridle on his lips:  there is no way by which the burden may be lightened; but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it.  To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.  There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say irrational or selfish:  but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is