estroyed. Even if some did get back, it
would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of
hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of
comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the
results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it
costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees
strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable
streets.

The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science,
turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of
mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning aesthetes who live in
rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can
supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and
who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot
return to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take
mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely
congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it.

The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the
essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the
bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them,
in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or
political appointment. The others may console themselves with the
thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards
which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical
work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far
as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work
will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it
is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a
still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the
future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on
any other ill--toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about
mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if
nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our
social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down
to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this _pons
asinorum_ of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf.

Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself,
and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivabl