rs."

"Living, meanwhile, at the rate of several thousand a year on rent and
interest. No, my dear, this is the way of those people who insist that
when they are in heaven they shall be spared the recollection of such a
place as hell, but are quite content that it shall exist outside their
consciousness. I respect my father more--I mean I despise him less--for
doing his own sweating and filching than I do the sensitive sluggards
and cowards who lent him their money to sweat and filch with, and asked
no questions provided the interest was paid punctually. And as to your
friends the artists, they are the worst of all."

"Oh, Sidney, you are determined not to be pleased. Artists don't keep
factories."

"No; but the factory is only a part of the machinery of the system.
Its basis is the tyranny of brain force, which, among civilized men, is
allowed to do what muscular force does among schoolboys and savages. The
schoolboy proposition is: 'I am stronger than you, therefore you shall
fag for me.' Its grown up form is: 'I am cleverer than you, therefore
you shall fag for me.' The state of things we produce by submitting to
this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or
foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have inherited their
privileges. Now, no men are greater sticklers for the arbitrary dominion
of genius and talent than your artists. The great painter is not
satisfied with being sought after and admired because his hands can do
more than ordinary hands, which they truly can, but he wants to be fed
as if his stomach needed more food than ordinary stomachs, which it does
not. A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man
who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure,
whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter,
poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with
his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an
advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in the
studio or library than in the field; or as if he needed more food to
enable him to do his work than the ploughman to enable him to do his. He
talks of the higher quality of his work, as if the higher quality of it
were of his own making--as if it gave him a right to work less for his
neighbor than his neighbor works for him--as if the ploughman could not
do better without him than he without the ploughman--as if