Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude, and are always counted to its credit,—­read the records of missionary devotion all over the world.  It is not any one of these things, then, taken by itself,—­no, nor all of them together,—­that make such a life undesirable.  A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God’s creatures.  Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.

If there were any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what made them different from the rest?  It can only have been this,—­that their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner ideal, while their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name.  These ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they are there.  In Mr. Wyckoff’s own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal was.  Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives.  For this his sweat and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to him exceptional esteem.  But it is easy to imagine his fellows with various other ideals.  To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored.  Or there might have been an apostle like Tolstoi himself, or his compatriot Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious mission.  Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many.  And who knows how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?

“A rugged, barren land,” says Phillips Brooks, “is poverty to live in,—­a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a root to eat.  But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities.  Behold! no land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral geology of the world.  See how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and solid.  No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away....  Poverty makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other’s human hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for faith in God....  I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem....