And all these people, my serfs or menials, who are undergoing any quantity or kind of hardship I choose to put on them,--all these people, nevertheless, are more contented than I am: I can't be happy, not I,--for one thing, because I haven't got the MS. Additional, (never mind what number,) in the British Museum, which they bought in 1848, for two hundred pounds, and I never saw it! And have never been easy in my mind, since.
But perhaps it is not the purpose of Heaven to make refined personages, like me, easy in our minds; we are supposed to be too grand for that. Happy, or easy, or otherwise, am I in my place, think you; and you, my serfs, in yours?
'You are not serfs,' say you, 'but free-born Britons'? Much good may your birth do you. What does your birth matter to me, since, now that you are grown men, you must do whatever I like, or die by starvation? 'Strike!'--will you? Can you live by striking? And when you are forced to work again, will not your masters choose again, as they have chosen hitherto, what work you are to do? Not serfs!--it is well if you are so much as that; a serf would know what o'clock he had to go to his work at; but I find that clocks are now no more comprehensible in England than in Italy, and you also have to be "whistled for like dogs," all over Yorkshire--or rather buzzed for, that being the appropriate call to business, of due honey-making kind. "Hark," says an old Athenian, according to Aristophanes, "how the nightingale has filled the thickets with honey" (meaning, with music as sweet). In Yorkshire, your steam-nightingales fill the woods with--Buzz; and for four miles round are audible, summoning you--to your pleasure, I suppose, my free-born?
It is well, I repeat, if you are so much as serfs. A serf means a 'saved person'--the word comes first from a Greek one, meaning to drag, or drag away into safety, (though captive safety), out of the slaughter of war. But alas, the trades most of you are set to now-a-days have no element of safety in them, either for body or soul. They take thirty years from your lives here;--what they take from your lives hereafter, ask your clergy. I have no opinion on that matter.
But I used another terrible word just now--'menial.' The modern English vulgar mind has a wonderful dread of doing anything of that sort!