Here you may see
how men have multiplied toil for toil's sake, have wrought to devise
work superfluous, have worn their lives away in imagining new forms
of weariness. The energy, the ingenuity daily put forth in these
grimy burrows task the brain's power of wondering. But that those
who sit here through the livelong day, through every season, through
all the years of the life that is granted them, who strain their
eyesight, who overtax their muscles, who nurse disease in their
frames, who put resolutely from them the thought of what existence
_might_ be--that these do it all without prospect or hope of
reward save the permission to eat and sleep and bring into the world
other creatures to strive with them for bread, surely that thought
is yet more marvellous.
Workers in metal, workers in glass and in enamel, workers in weed,
workers in every substance on earth, or from the waters under the
earth, that can be made commercially valuable. In Clerkenwell the
demand is not so much for rude strength as for the cunning fingers
and the contriving brain. The inscriptions on the house-fronts would
make you believe that you were in a region of gold and silver and
precious stones.
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