I had actually arrived at the conclusion that if there was any good life, and freedom from insecurity, and beauty, and knowledge, or leisure, then the men who did the world’s dirty, sweaty, toilsome, risky work, and the women who shared the life with them, ought to be the first entitled to these things…I held that no man needs knowledge more than he who is subject to those who have knowledge–and because they have knowledge. That if there is one man in the world who need knowledge, it is he who does the world’s most needful work and gets least return because he lacks knowledge.
Jack Lawson (a miner born in 1881) quoted in Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 52-53.