What matters it that they have undertaken a
life of labour from necessity, and with a full consciousness of the
dangers they incur in it? For whom have they been labouring, but for
us? Their handiwork renders our houses luxurious. We wear the
clothes they make. We eat the food they produce. They sit in
darkness and the shadow of death that we may enjoy light and life and
luxury and civilisation. True, they are free men, in name, not free
though from the iron necessity of crushing toil. Shall we make their
liberty a cloak for our licentiousness? and because they are our
brothers and not our slaves, answer with Cain, "Am I my brother's
keeper?" What if we have paid them the wages which they ask? We do
not feed our beasts of burden only as long as they are in health, and
when they fall sick leave them to cure themselves and starve--and
these are not our beasts of burden; they are members of Christ,
children of God, inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. Prove it to
them, then, for they are in bitter danger of forgetting it in these
days. Prove to them, by helping to cure their maladies, that they
are members of Christ, that they do indeed belong to Him who without
fee or payment freely cured the sick of Judaea in old time.
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