emely bad taste and that you decline to answer it. But you cannot
object to being asked how many minutes of a bookmaker's time is worth
two hours of an astronomer's?

VITAL DISTRIBUTION.

In the end you are forced to ask the question you should have asked at
the beginning. What do you give a man an income for? Obviously to keep
him alive. Since it is evident that the first condition on which he can
be kept alive without enslaving somebody else is that he shall produce
an equivalent for what it costs to keep him alive, we may quite
rationally compel him to abstain from idling by whatever means we employ
to compel him to abstain from murder, arson, forgery, or any other
crime. The one supremely foolish thing to do with him is to do nothing;
that is, to be as idle, lazy, and heartless in dealing with him as he is
in dealing with us. Even if we provided work for him instead of basing,
as we do, our whole industrial system on successive competitive waves
of overwork with their ensuing troughs of unemployment, we should still
sternly deny him the alternative of not doing it; for the result must be
that he will become poor and make his children poor if he has any; and
poor people are cancers in the commonwealth, costing far more than if
they were handsomely pensioned off as incurables. Jesus had more sense
than to propose anything of the sort. He said to his disciples, in
effect, "Do your work for love; and let the other people lodge and
feed and clothe you for love." Or, as we should put it nowadays, "for
nothing." All human experience and all natural uncommercialized human
aspiration point to this as the right path. The Greeks said, "First
secure an independent income; and then practise virtue." We all strive
towards an independent income. We all know as well as Jesus did that
if we have to take thought for the morrow as to whether there shall be
anything to eat or drink it will be impossible for us to think of nobler
things, or live a higher life than that of a mole, whose life is from
beginning to end a frenzied pursuit of food. Until the community is
organized in such a way that the fear of bodily want is forgotten as
completely as the fear of wolves already is in civilized capitals, we
shall never have a decent social life. Indeed the whole attraction of
our present arrangements lies in the fact that they do relieve a
handful of us from this fear; but as the relief is effected stupidly and
wickedly by making the f