It will be said here that, on the contrary, heaven is always conceived
as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent
income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays
for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally
conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable,
that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though
plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the
genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb "Heaven for
holiness and Hell for company." Second, I point out that the wretched
people who have independent incomes and no useful occupation, do the
most amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to make themselves
tired and hungry in the evening. When they are not involved in what they
call sport, they are doing aimlessly what other people have to be paid
to do: driving horses and motor cars; trying on dresses and walking up
and down to shew them off; and acting as footmen and housemaids to royal
personages. The sole and obvious cause of the notion that idleness is
delightful and that heaven is a place where there is nothing to be done,
is our school system and our industrial system. The school is a prison
in which work is a punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons, hard
labor, the only alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as an
aggravation of his punishment; and everything possible is done to
intensify the prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an
evil. In industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners. Under such
absurd circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as our
habits. If we were habitually underworked and overfed, our notion
of heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously for
twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat.
Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, and
that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" and it will
be seen that we have no right to impose a perpetual holiday on children.
If we did, they would soon outdo the Labor Party in their claim for a
Right to Work Bill.
In any case no child should be brought up to suppose that its food and
clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty
space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea
of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation
to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the
repayment as a point of honor. If we did that today--and nothing but
flat dishonesty prevents us from doing it--we should have no idle rich
and indeed probably no rich, since there is no distinction in being
rich if you have to pay scot and lot in personal effort like the working
folk. Therefore, if for only half an hour a day, a child should do
something serviceable to the community.
Productive work for children has the advantage that its discipline is
the discipline of impersonal necessity, not that of wanton personal
coercion. The eagerness of children in our industrial districts to
escape from school to the factory is not caused by lighter tasks or
shorter hours in the factory, nor altogether by the temptation of wages,
nor even by the desire for novelty, but by the dignity of adult work,
the exchange of the factitious personal tyranny of the schoolmaster,
from which the grown-ups are free, for the stern but entirely dignified
Laws of Life to which all flesh is subject.