Wordsworth was no
fanatical opponent of manufacturing industry. He had intimate
friends among manufacturers; and in one of his letters he speaks of
promising himself much pleasure from witnessing the increased regard
for the welfare of factory hands of which one of these friends had
set the example. But he never lost sight of the fact that the life
of the mill-hand is an anomaly--is a life not in the order of nature,
and which requires to be justified by manifest necessity and by
continuous care. The question to what extent we may acquiesce in the
continuance of a low order of human beings, existing for our
enjoyment rather than for their own, may be answered with
plausibility in very different tones; from the Communist who cannot
rest content in the inferiority of any one man's position to any
other's, to the philosopher who holds that mankind has made the most
eminent progress when a few chosen individuals have been supported
in easy brilliancy by a population of serfs or slaves. Wordsworth's
answer to this question is at once conservative and philanthropic.
He holds to the distinction of classes, and thus admits a difference
in the fulness and value of human lots.
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