Workers’ Conception of Religion (1890)

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One of the men asked me whether that had happened at the time of the Trojan War? He knew about the Trojan War – had read all about it, and he began to repeat the Homeric tale, very picturesquely and well. Evidently he had somewhere got hold of a copy of the “Iliad.”

Then the talk made a sudden jump to Egypt and the Pharaohs, about whom they all knew something. We spoke of the Pyramids, which especially interested them on account of the workmen who had – with what an incredible toil – piled those vast stones one upon the other.

H. “Those were the beasts of burden, the slaves of four thousand years ago. To-day, we factory hands are the slaves and beasts of burden.”

That was going rather too far, I ventured, and instanced the far better general education which everyone now has.

H. disputed the point; the masses were no more uneducated and ignorant than they are, on the average, to-day.

“No; they used to be far cleverer than they are nowadays,” broke in another, S., half in jest, half in earnest. “They used to be able to change water into wine.” He said this tentatively; I could not discover his real thought.

My foreman laughed outright when he heard it, and H. smiled too, with rather a superior air. S. went on. “Yes, that’s what we believe, but –”

But the foreman cut him short. “What we believe is, that ten pounds of veal makes a good stew.”

And S. ventured no reply. The talk ran on, and fell into economic channels, and I happened to make use of the expression “social question.” That stung H., who said drily that I didn’t know what the social question was.

“May be so,” I said. “In fact, it isn’t easy to say what it is; we might talk for hours, or days, or weeks about it. Anyhow, it is a monster with many heads and with two sides, the material and the spiritual, just as a man himself is body and soul.”

But the foreman and H. began to laugh.

“Soul! There’s no such thing. There’s a brain, a nervous system that does its work like a machine. Its work, or the results of its work, people to-day call ‘soul.’”