The child of the future, then, if there is to be any future but one of
decay, will work more or less for its living from an early age; and
in doing so it will not shock anyone, provided there be no longer any
reason to associate the conception of children working for their living
with infants toiling in a factory for ten hours a day or boys drudging
from nine to six under gas lamps in underground city offices. Lads and
lasses in their teens will probably be able to produce as much as the
most expensive person now costs in his own person (it is retinue that
eats up the big income) without working too hard or too long for quite
as much happiness as they can enjoy. The question to be balanced then
will be, not how soon people should be put to work, but how soon they
should be released from any obligation of the kind. A life's work is
like a day's work: it can begin early and leave off early or begin late
and leave off late, or, as with us, begin too early and never leave off
at all, obviously the worst of all possible plans. In any event we
must finally reckon work, not as the curse our schools and prisons and
capitalist profit factories make it seem today, but as a prime necessity
of a tolerable existence. And if we cannot devise fresh wants as fast
as we develop the means of supplying them, there will come a scarcity
of the needed, cut-and-dried, appointed work that is always ready to
everybody's hand. It may have to be shared out among people all of whom
want more of it. And then a new sort of laziness will become the bugbear
of society: the laziness that refuses to face the mental toil and
adventure of making work by inventing new ideas or extending the domain
of knowledge, and insists on a ready-made routine. It may come to
forcing people to retire before they are willing to make way for younger
ones: that is, to driving all persons of a certain age out of industry,
leaving them to find something experimental to occupy them on pain of
perpetual holiday. Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year
for the sake of having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, the
cheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most
fastidious, and best bred. In short, there is no end to the astonishing
things that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes first a blessing
and then an incurable habit. And in that day we must not grudge children
their share of it.