“Oh, you are now getting on ticklish ground, for it is here that the
critics of ‘The Man with the Hoe’ congregate and jubilate. Let me
say briefly, though, in answer to you and to them, that I believe in
labor, that I believe in its humanizing and redeeming power. Indeed,
from a religious point of view, I believe that a man’s craft furnishes
the chief basis of his redemption. While one is making a house,
he is making himself. While he chisels the block of marble he is
invisibly shaping his own soul. And it does not matter much what a man
does,—whether he builds a poem or hoes in a garden. The chief thing is
the way we do our work. It must be done thoroughly, and in the spirit
of loving service. Work of this order is a perpetual prayer. The doer
is elevated by such work.
“But, while all this is true, it is also true that excesses are
evils,—that overwork and underpaid work tend to break down instead of
build up. Work is good for the child, but I can put such heavy burdens
upon him as to deform his body and stunt his mind.
“‘The Man with the Hoe’ is, of course, the type of industrial
oppression in all lands and in all parts of labor. He is the man who
has been chained to the wheel by the fierce necessity for bread,—the
man with no time for rest, no time for study, no time for thought, no
time for the mighty hopes that make us men. The poem is not a protest
against labor; it is a protest against the degradation of labor.”