Page:Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne.djvu/246

232 "hired servants," and to have gone on to the duties of soldiers, for you know "Soldier" means a person who is paid to fight with regular pay—literally with "soldi " or "sous"—the "penny a day" of the vineyard labourers: but I can't now: only just this much, that our whole system of work must be based on the nobleness of soldiership—so that we shall all be soldiers of either ploughshare or sword; and literally all our actual and professed soldiers, whether professed for a time only, or for life, must be kept to hard work of hand, when not in actual war; their honour consisting in being set to service of more pain and danger than others; to lifeboat service; to redeeming of ground from furious rivers or sea—or mountain ruin; to subduing wild and unhealthy land, and extending the confines of colonies in the front of miasm and famine, and savage races.

And much of our harder home work must be done in a kind of soldiership, by bands of trained workers sent from place to place and town to town; doing, with strong and sudden hand, what is needed for help, and