Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered
in your own person the thing which the words try to describe. There are
wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about “the
working classes,” and satisfy themselves that a day’s hard intellectual
work is very much harder than a day’s hard manual toil, and is
righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that,
you know, because they know all about the one, but haven’t tried the
other. But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there
isn’t money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pick-axe thirty
days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as
near nothing as you can cipher it down—and I will be satisfied, too.