What is work? Work is energy applied to the creation of either material
or immaterial products. The digging of the soil preparatory to raising a
corn-crop is work; the making of brooms; the writing of fugues. There is
no one who does not work, at one time or another, and a man's social
value depends largely upon the amount of work that he can do.
Even the energy which is seemingly applied to destructive tasks is
really subsidiary to a constructive ideal. Thus the hewing of timber is
a destructive task, but its object is not to scatter trees around, but
to make a clearing on which to plant wheat; or to have lumber, in order
to build a house. So, also, we blast rock, in order to get stones for a
stone wall, or for the filling of a road-bed. And we rip up old clothes
in order to have rags, and to make room in our homes for other things.
Destructiveness from a sheer love of destructiveness is not work--it is
vandalism. The true Man works. When Adam's crook-stick turned over the
brown earth to make it fertile, he began the industry of the world. The
whole horizon of man's endeavor is spanned by one word, Work. It has
built cities, bridged rivers, united continents, and sent the myriad
spindles of trade whirring under a thousand changing skies.
Work is the open-sesame of success. It is curious to see how uneasily
some men will roam from one end of the earth to the other, trying to
find an easy place, a place where work will not be needed or required.
There is no such place. The higher the honor, the harder the work. The
power to work is ordinarily the measure of a man's possibilities of
success. Long hours, hard toil, lack of recognition and appreciation,
drudgery, a thousand attempts to one successful issue,--these are the
ways in which the colossal achievements of mankind have been built up.
Work, as has well been said, is an ascending stairway. On its broad base
are ranged all the multitudes of the earth. Those who can climb mount
the higher and ever-narrowing stair.
The great man can begin anywhere, or with any task. He says, If I am
going into the giant-business, I may as well begin now! Born and bred in
the forest, he lays hand to his axe, and looking up at some tall oak,
cries out, I will begin here! With the first stroke of the axe, success
is not less sure than in his last endeavor. Success of the right kind is
a scientific achievement.
The line has not yet been drawn, and I doubt whether it ever can be
drawn, between productive and non-productive labor. There is a cleavage
of tasks, however, which may be approximately expressed, as work that is
done for support, for daily bread, and work which is done because
certain faculties of mind and heart and soul demand expression,
development, and scope. We all have powers which are willing to be set
in action primarily for self-preservation--for personal, material, and
transitory ends. We are also endowed with faculties which react,
primarily, in behalf of universal aims, though that may not debar them
from also bringing an advantage to ourselves. In proportion as we are
talented, magnanimous, and high-minded, we delight in spending a part of
our lives in working for the race.
Thus Thoreau, when he, "by surveying, carpentry and day-labor of various
other kinds," had earned $13.34, was doing income-work, the work by
which he had to live. For the same purpose, he worked at raising
potatoes, green corn, and peas. When he wrote _Walden_, he did a kind of
work which also in time brought him an income. But he did not write
_Walden_ for food or money; he wrote it primarily because he liked to
write, and for the benefit of mankind.
In order to be contented and happy, each normal adult human being must
have at least the chance of doing these two kinds of work. Unless he or
she can do income-work, he or she is not economically independent;
unless he can do universal work, he is not socially and
spiritually free.
Much of the present-day discontent is owing to the fact that these two
kinds of work are not represented, as they should be, in every
working-life.
The problem in regard to the working-man is not how to pet him, nor to
patronize him, but how to educate him and inspire him! He is not a
parasite to be fed by the capitalist, nor is the capitalist a parasite
upon the working-power of the working-man. Both are men. The problem is,
How shall the capitalist lead the noblest, most public-spirited, and
helpful life in relation to those in his employ? How shall the
working-man lay hold on the best that life can give? How shall he find a
work which he is competent to do, and likes to do, and may be supported
by doing--and at the same time have a chance to grow; to enter into the
large, free culture-life of the world?
The complaint of the working-man, when really analyzed, runs down to
this: I do income-work, but it does not bring me bread enough to live.
Not only that, but ground down as I am by toil, all possibility of the
larger, universal work is shut away from me. My faculties are
atrophied--paralyzed--and hence my soul smoulders with deep and angry
discontent. This ceaseless and sordid anxiety for bread cuts me out of
my world-life, my world-toil. I cannot do scientific research-work, or
write the books and papers that I ought. My universal labor is
interrupted: I cannot be happy until I can take up this larger
work again.
As the trade of civilization advances, the meaning of bread changes. The
university professor, no less than the day-laborer, finds his income
too small for him, and says, "I, too, do income-work which does not
bring me bread, books, travel, society, a summer home, and surroundings
which are not only decent and sanitary, but refined and beautiful."
Is it not also the source of the discontent to-day, among almost all
classes of women, except the most highly educated and efficient? Women
say--our modern daughters, wives, and mothers: "In the home, we do
income-work for which we do not receive income. When strangers do this
work, they are paid, and we are not." In addition, many a woman is so
bound down by daily tasks, that her whole soul cries out, and we hear of
the high rate of insanity among farmers' wives, of nervous prostration
of the housewives in our towns, and become accustomed to such
expressions as "the death of a woman on a Kansas farm."
This discontent takes many restless forms. It leads daughters, who ought
to be at home, out into morally dangerous but income-earning work; it
takes wives out into all manner of clubs, without regard to the fact: as
to whether the particular club, in its atmosphere and influence, is good
or bad; it brings discouragement, disorder, and unrest into the home,
dissatisfaction with house-duties and home-tasks, and is sapping our
life where it should be best and strongest--in the home--taking out of
it youth, spirit, enthusiasm, inspiration, and content.
The three questions asked in regard to each worker are: 1. What work
can he do? 2. Of what quality? 3. In what time? The difference between
industry and idleness is that work is one thing which no one may
honorably escape. Since it must be done, the problem of life is not how
to escape work, but how to find the right work, and how best to do it,
and most swiftly, when the choice is made.
"_Forth they come from grief and torment; on they wend
toward health and mirth,
All the wide world is their dwelling, every corner of the
earth.
Buy them, sell them for thy service! Try the bargain what
'tis worth,
For the days are marching on.
"These are they who build thy houses, weave thy raiment,
win thy wheat,
Smooth the rugged, fill the barren, turn the bitter into
sweet,
All for thee this day--and ever. What reward for them
is meet?
Till the host comes marching on._"