§ XV. ” ...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.... In all ages and in all countries reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint but rejoicingly; and famine and peril and sword and all evil and all shame have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature prompted and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered with its wheels, and weighted with its hammer strokes--this nature bade not--this God blesses not--this humanity for no long time is able to endure.”
§ XVI. “We have much studied, and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the Division of Labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:--Divided into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,--sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discussed what it is--we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this--that we manufacture everything there except men--we blanch cotton and strengthen steel and refine sugar and shape pottery--but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine or to reform a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only ... by a right understanding on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or beauty or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”