done by dirty and poorly paid people that we have come to think that it
is disgraceful to do it, and that unless a dirty and disgraced class
existed it would not be done at all. This is nonsense. Some of the
dirtiest work in the world is done by titled surgeons and physicians
who are highly educated, highly paid, and move in the best society. The
nurses who assist them are often their equals in general education,
and sometimes their superiors in rank. Nobody dreams of paying nurses
less or respecting them less than typists in city offices, whose work
is much cleaner. Laboratory work and anatomical work, which involves
dissecting dead bodies, and analysing the secretions and excretions of
live ones, is sometimes revoltingly dirty from the point of view of a
tidy housekeeper; yet it has to be done by gentlemen and ladies of the
professional class. And every tidy housekeeper knows that houses cannot
be kept clean without dirty work. The bearing and nursing of children
are by no means elegant drawingroom amusements; but nobody dares
suggest that they are not in the highest degree honorable, nor do the
most fastidiously refined women shirk their turn when it comes.
It must be remembered too that a great deal of work which is now
dirty because it is done in a crude way by dirty people can be done
in a clean way by clean people. Ladies and gentlemen who attend to
their own motor cars, as many of them do, manage to do it with less
mess and personal soiling than a slovenly general servant will get
herself into when laying a fire. On the whole, the necessary work of
the world can be done with no more dirt than healthy people of all
classes can stand. The truth of the matter is that it is not really
the work that is objected to so much as its association with poverty
and degradation. Thus a country gentleman does not object to drive
his car; but he would object very strongly to wear the livery of his
chauffeur; and a lady will tidy up a room without turning a hair,
though she would die rather than be seen in a parlormaid’s cap and
apron, neat and becoming as they are. These are as honorable as any
other uniform, and much more honorable than the finery of an idle
woman: the parlormaids are beginning to object to them only because
they have been associated in the past with a servile condition and a
lack of respect to which parlormaids are no longer disposed to submit.
But they have no objection to the work. Both the parlormaid and her
employer (I dare not say her mistress), if they are fond of flowers
and animals, will grub in a garden all day, or wash dogs or rid them
of vermin with the greatest solicitude, without considering the dirt
involved in these jobs in the least derogatory to their dignity. If
all dustmen were dukes nobody would object to the dust: the dustmen
would put little pictures on their notepaper of their hats with flaps
down the backs just as now dukes put little pictures of their coronets;
and everyone would be proud to have a dustman to dinner if he would
condescend to come. We may take it that nobody objects to necessary
work of any kind because of the work itself; what everybody objects to
is being seen doing something that is usually done only by persons of
lower rank or by colored slaves. We sometimes even do things badly on
purpose because those who do them well are classed as our inferiors.
For example, a foolish young gentleman of property will write badly
because clerks write well; and the ambassador of a republic will wear
trousers instead of knee-breeches and silk stockings at court, because,
though breeches and stockings are handsomer, they are a livery; and
republicans consider liveries servile.
Still, when we have put out of our heads a great deal of nonsense about
dirty work, the fact remains that though all useful work may be equally
honorable, all useful work is most certainly not equally agreeable or
equally exhausting. To escape facing this fact we may plead that some
people have such very queer tastes that it is almost impossible to
mention an occupation that you will not find somebody with a craze for.
There is never any difficulty in finding a willing hangman. There are
men who are happy keeping lighthouses on rocks in the sea so remote
and dangerous that it is often months before they can be relieved.
And a lighthouse is at least steady, whereas a lightship may never
cease rolling about in a way that would make most of us wish ourselves
dead. Yet men are found to man lightships for wages and pensions no
better than they could find in good employment on shore. Mining seems
a horrible and unnatural occupation; but it is not unpopular. Children
left to themselves do the most uncomfortable and unpleasant things to
amuse themselves, very much as a blackbeetle, though it has the run of
the house, prefers the basement to the drawingroom. The saying that God
never made a job but He made a man or woman to do it is true up to a
certain point.
But when all possible allowances are made for these idiosyncrasies it
remains true that it is much easier to find a boy who wants to be a
gardener or an engine driver, and a girl who wants to be a film actress
or a telephone operator, than a boy who wants to be a sewerman, or a
girl who wants to be a ragpicker. A great deal can be done to make
unpopular occupations more agreeable; and some of them can be got rid
of altogether, and would have been got rid of long ago if there had
been no class of very poor and rough people to put them upon. Smoke and
soot can be done away with; sculleries can be made much pleasanter than
most solicitors’ offices; the unpleasantness of a sewerman’s work is
already mostly imaginary; coal mining may be put an end to by using the
tides to produce electric power; and there are many other ways in which
work which is now repulsive can be made no irksomer than the general
run of necessary labor. But until this happens all the people who have
no particular fancy one way or the other will want to do the pleasanter
sorts of work.
Fortunately there is a way of equalizing the attraction of different
occupations. And this brings us to that very important part of our
lives that we call our leisure. Sailors call it their liberty.
There is one thing that we all desire; and that is freedom. By this
we mean freedom from any obligation to do anything except just what
we like, without a thought of tomorrow’s dinner or any other of the
necessities that make slaves of us. We are free only as long as we can
say “My time is my own”. When workers working ten hours a day agitate
for an eight-hour day, what they really want is not eight hours work
instead of ten, but sixteen hours off duty instead of fourteen. And
out of this sixteen hours must come eight hours sleep and a few hours
for eating and drinking, dressing and undressing, washing and resting;
so that even with an eight hours working day the real leisure of the
workers: that is, the time they have after they are properly rested
and fed and cleaned up and ready for any adventures or amusements or
hobbies they care for, is no more than a few hours; and these few are
reduced in value by the shortness of daylight in winter, and cut down
by the time it takes to get into the country or wherever is the best
place to enjoy oneself. Married women, whose working place is the man’s
home, want to get away from home for recreation, just as men want to
get away from the places where they work; in fact a good deal of our
domestic quarrelling arises because the man wants to spend his leisure
at home whilst the woman wants to spend hers abroad. Women love hotels:
men hate them.
Take, however, the case of a man and his wife who are agreed in liking
to spend their leisure away from home. Suppose the man’s working day
is eight hours, and that he spends eight hours in bed and four over
his breakfast, dinner, washing, dressing, and resting. It does not
follow that he can have four hours to spare for amusement with his wife
every day. Their spare four hours are more likely to be half wasted in
waiting for the theatre or picture show to begin; for they must leave
the open air amusements, tennis, golf, cycling, and the seaside, for
the week-end or Bank Holiday. Consequently he is always craving for
more leisure. This is why we see people preferring rough and strict
employments which leave them some time to themselves to much more
gentle situations in which they are never free. In a factory town it is
often impossible to get a handy and intelligent domestic servant, or
indeed to get a servant at all. That is not because the servant need
work harder or put up with worse treatment than the factory girl or
the shop assistant, but because she has no time she can call her own.
She is always waiting on the doorbell even when you dare not ring the
drawingroom bell lest she should rush up and give notice. To induce
her to stay, you have to give her an evening out every fortnight; then
one every week; then an afternoon a week as well; then two afternoons
a week; then leave to entertain her friends in the drawingroom and use
the piano occasionally (at which times you must clear out of your own
house); and the end is that, long before you have come to the end of
the concessions you are expected to make, you discover that it is not
worth keeping a servant at all on such terms, and take to doing the
housework yourself with modern labor saving appliances. But even if you
put up with the evenings out and all the rest of it, the girl has still
no satisfying sense of freedom; she may not want to stay out all night
even for the most innocent purposes; but she wants to feel that she
might if she liked. That is human nature.
We now see how we can make compensatory arrangements as between
people who do more or less agreeable and easy sorts of work. Give
more leisure, earlier retirement into the superannuated class, more
holidays, in the less agreeable employments, and they will be as much
sought after as the more agreeable ones with less leisure. In a picture
gallery you will find a nicely dressed lady sitting at a table with
nothing to do but to tell anyone who asks what is the price of any
particular picture, and take an order for it if one is given. She has
many pleasant chats with journalists and artists; and if she is bored
she can read a novel. Her desk chair is comfortable; and she takes care
that it shall be near the stove. But the gallery has to be scrubbed
and dusted every day; and its windows have to be kept clean. It is
clear that the lady’s job is a much softer one than the charwoman’s. To
balance them you must either let them take their turns at the desk and
at the scrubbing on alternate days or weeks; or else, as a first-rate
scrubber and duster and cleaner might make a very bad business lady,
and a very attractive business lady might make a very bad scrubber, you
must let the charwoman go home and have the rest of the day to herself
earlier than the lady at the desk.
Public picture galleries, in which the pictures are not sold, require
the services of guardians who have nothing to do but wear a respectable
uniform and see that people do not smoke nor steal the pictures, nor
poke umbrellas through them when pointing out their beauties. Compare
this work with that of the steel smelter, who has to exercise great
muscular strength among blast furnaces and pools of molten metal; that
is to say, in an atmosphere which to an unaccustomed person would seem
the nearest thing to hell on earth! It is true that the steel smelter
would very soon get bored with the gallery attendant’s job, and would
go back to the furnaces and the molten metal sooner than stick it;
whilst the gallery attendant could not do the steel smelter’s job at
all, being too old, or too soft, or too lazy, or all three combined.
One is a young man’s job and the other an old man’s job. We balance
them at present by paying the steel smelter more wages. But the same
effect can be produced by giving him more leisure, either in holidays
or shorter hours. The workers do this themselves when they can. When
they are paid, not by time, but by the piece; and when through a rise
in prices or a great rush of orders they find that they can earn twice
as much in a week as they are accustomed to live on, they can choose
between double wages and double leisure. They usually choose double
leisure, taking home the same money as before, but working from Monday
to Wednesday only, and taking a Thursday to Saturday holiday. They do
not want more work and more money: they want more leisure for the same
work, which proves that money is not the only incentive to work, nor
the strongest. Leisure, or freedom, is stronger when the work is not
pleasurable in itself.
24
THE TYRANNY OF NATURE
The very first lesson that should be taught us when we are old enough
to understand it is that complete freedom from the obligation to work
is unnatural, and ought to be illegal, as we can escape our share of
the burden of work only by throwing it on someone else’s shoulders.
Nature inexorably ordains that the human race shall perish of famine if
it stops working. We cannot escape from this tyranny. The question we
have to settle is how much leisure we can afford to allow ourselves.
Even if we must work like galley slaves whilst we are at it, how soon
may we leave off with a good conscience, knowing that we have done our
share and may now go free until tomorrow? That question has never been
answered, and cannot be answered under our system because so many of
the workers are doing work that is not merely useless but harmful. But
if by an equal distribution of income and a fair division of work we
could find out the answer, then we should think of our share of work as
earning us, not so much money, but so much freedom.
And another curious thing would happen. We now revolt against the
slavery of work because we feel ourselves to be the slaves, not of
Nature and Necessity, but of our employers and those for whom they
have to employ us. We therefore hate work and regard it as a curse.
But if everyone shared the burden and the reward equally, we should
lose this feeling. Nobody would feel put upon; and everybody would
know that the more work was done the more everybody would get, since
the division of what the work produced would be equal. We should then
discover that haymaking is not the only work that is enjoyable. Factory
work, when it is not overdriven, is very social and can be very jolly:
that is one of the reasons why girls prefer working in weaving sheds
in a deafening din to sitting lonely in a kitchen. Navvies have heavy
work; but they are in the open air: they talk, fight, gamble, and have
plenty of change from place to place; and this is much better fun than
the sort of clerking that means only counting another man’s money and
writing it down in figures in a dingy office. Besides the work that is
enjoyable from its circumstances there is the work that is interesting
and enjoyable in itself, like the work of the philosophers and of the
different kinds of artists who will work for nothing rather than not
work at all; but this, under a system of equal division, would probably
become a product of leisure rather than of compulsory industry.
Now consider the so-called pleasures that are sold to us as more
enjoyable than work. The excursion train, the seaside lodgings, the
catchpenny shows, the drink, the childish excitement about football
and cricket, the little bands of desperately poor Follies and Pierrots
pretending to be funny and cute when they are only vulgar and silly,
and all the rest of the attempts to persuade the Intelligent Woman that
she is having a glorious treat when she is in fact being plundered and
bored and tired out and sent home cross and miserable: do not these
shew that people will snatch at anything, however uneasy, for the
sake of change when their few whole days of leisure are given to them
at long intervals on Bank Holidays and the like? If they had enough
real leisure every day as well as work they would learn how to enjoy
themselves. At present they are duffers at this important art. All they
can do is to buy the alluringly advertized pleasures that are offered
to them for money. They seldom have sense enough to notice that these
pleasures have no pleasure in them, and are endured only as a relief
from the monotony of the daily leisureless drudgery.
When people have leisure enough to learn how to live, and to know the
difference between real and sham enjoyment, they will not only begin
to enjoy their work, but to understand why Sir George Cornewall Lewis
said that life would be tolerable but for its amusements. He was clever
enough to see that the amusements, instead of amusing him, wasted
his time and his money and spoiled his temper. Now there is nothing
so disagreeable to a healthy person as wasting time. See how healthy
children pretend to be doing something or making something until they
are tired! Well, it would be as natural for grown-up people to build
real castles for the fun of it as for children to build sand castles.
When they are tired they do not want to work at all, but just to do
nothing until they fall asleep. We never want to work at pleasure: what
we want is work with some pleasure and interest in it to occupy our
time and exercise our muscles and minds. No slave can understand this,
because he is overworked and underrespected; and when he can escape
from work he rushes into gross and excessive vices that correspond
to his gross and excessive labor. Set him free, and he may never be
able to shake off his old horror of labor and his old vices; but never
mind: he and his generation will die out; and their sons and daughters
will be able to enjoy their freedom. And one way in which they will
enjoy it will be to put in a great deal of extra work for the sake of
making useful things beautiful and good things better, to say nothing
of getting rid of bad things. For the world is like a garden: it needs
weeding as well as sowing. There is use and pleasure in destruction as
well as in construction: the one is as necessary as the other.
To have a really precise understanding of this matter you must
distinguish not merely between labor and leisure but between leisure
and rest. Labor is doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like;
rest is doing nothing whilst our bodies and minds are recovering
from their fatigue. Now doing what we like is often as laborious as
doing what we must. Suppose it takes the form of running at the top
of our speed to kick a ball up and down a field! That is harder than
many forms of necessary labor. Looking at other people doing it is a
way of resting, like reading a book instead of writing it. If we all
had a full share of leisure we could not spend the whole of it in
kicking balls, or whacking them about with golf clubs, or in shooting
and hunting. Much of it would be given to useful work; and though
our compulsory labor, neglect to perform which would be treated as
a crime, might possibly be reduced to two or three hours a day, we
should add much voluntary work to that in our leisure time, doing for
fun a huge mass of nationally beneficial work that we cannot get done
at present for love or money. Every woman whose husband is engaged
in interesting work knows the difficulty of getting him away from it
even to his meals; in fact, jealousy of a man’s work sometimes causes
serious domestic unhappiness; and the same thing occurs when a woman
takes up some absorbing pursuit, and finds it and its associations more
interesting than her husband’s company and conversation and friends.
In the professions where the work is solitary and independent of
office and factory hours and steam engines, the number of people who
injure their health and even kill themselves prematurely by overwork
is so considerable that the philosopher Herbert Spencer never missed
an opportunity of warning people against the craze for work. It can
get hold of us exactly as the craze for drink can. Its victims go on
working long after they are so worn out that their operations are doing
more harm than good.
25
THE POPULATION QUESTION
The second of the two stock objections to equal division of income
is that its benefits, if any, would soon be swallowed up by married
couples having too many children. The people who say this always
declare at the same time that our existing poverty is caused by there
being already too many people in the world, or, to put it the other way
round, that the world is too small to produce food enough for all the
people in it.
Now even if this were true, it would be no objection to an equal
division of income; for the less we have, the more important it is that
it should be equally divided, so as to make it go as far as possible,
and avoid adding the evils of inequality to those of scarcity. But it
is not true. What is true is that the more civilized people there are
in the world the poorer most of them are relatively; but the plain
cause of this is that the wealth they produce and the leisure they
provide for are so unequally divided between them that at least half of
them are living parasitically on the other half instead of producing
maintenance for themselves.
Consider the case of domestic servants. Most people who can afford to
keep a servant keep one only; but in Mayfair a young couple moving in
the richest society cannot get on without nine servants, even before
they have any children to be attended to. Yet everyone knows that the
couples who have only one servant, or at most two (to say nothing of
those who have none), are better attended to and more comfortable in
their homes than the unfortunate young people who have to find room for
nine grown-up persons downstairs, and keep the peace between them.
The truth is, of course, that the nine servants are attending mostly to
one another and not to their employers. If you must have a butler and
footman because it is the fashion, you must have somebody to cook their
meals and make their beds. Housekeepers and ladies’ maids need domestic
service as much as the lady of the house, and are much more particular
about not putting their hands to anything that is not strictly their
business. It is therefore a mistake to say that nine servants are
ridiculous with only two people to be attended. There are eleven people
in the house to be attended; and as nine of them have to do all this
attendance between them, there is not so much to spare for the odd
two as might be imagined. That is why couples with nine servants are
continually complaining of the difficulty of getting on with so few,
and supplementing them with charwomen and jobbing dressmakers and
errand boys. Families of ordinary size and extraordinary income find
themselves accumulating thirty servants; and as the thirty are all more
or less waiting on oneanother there is no limit except that of sleeping
room to the number wanted; the more servants you have, the less time
they have to attend to you, and therefore, the more you need, or rather
the more they need, which is much jollier for them than for you.
Now it is plain that these hordes of servants are not supporting
themselves. They are supported by their employer; and if he is an idle
rich man living on rents and dividends: that is, being supported by
the labor of his tenants and of the workers in the companies in which
he has shares, then the whole establishment, servants, employer and
all, is not self-supporting, and would not be even if the world were
made ten times as large as it is to accommodate them. Instead of too
many people in the world there are too many idlers, and much too many
workers wasting their time in attending to idlers. Get rid of the
idlers, and set these workers to useful work, and we shall hear no more
for a long time yet about the world being overcrowded. Perhaps we shall
never hear of it again. Nature has a way with her in these matters.
Some people will find it easier to understand this if I put it to
them like a sum in arithmetic. Suppose 20 men are producing by their
labor £100 a year each, and they agree, or are forced by law, to give
up £50 of it to the owner of the estate on which they work. The owner
will receive £1000 a year, not for work, but for owning. The owner can
afford to spend £500 a year on himself, which makes him ten times as
rich as any of the twenty workers, and use the other £500 to hire six
men and a boy at £75 a year each to wait on him as servants and act as
an armed force to deal with any of the twenty men who may attempt to
rebel and withhold the £50 from him. The six men will not take the part
of the men with £50 a year because they themselves get £75; and they
are not clever enough to see that if they all joined to get rid of the
owner and do useful work, they could have £100 a year apiece.