e mechanization of industry is
that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form
of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is
by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man,
thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker--for what else does it
mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a
shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker,
the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who
calls himself _par excellence_ a "worker," it can never be too short.

The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to
transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will
be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially
as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even,
it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical
work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul
on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes
him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has
passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's
task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour,
with the one longing that it might die more quickly--he knows how the
shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has
become for the factory artisan a goal of existence.

But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all
wearinesses--the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes
again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and
distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of
exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the
shallowest kind of tea-table chatter to talk about good music,
edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free
Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy
for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can
alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again
under the next day's toil.

The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome
labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the
land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks
indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which
mechanical employment has d