e
practisers of delightful industries, like gardening; some are students,
artists, inventors, or discoverers, men lured forward by successive
hopes; and the rest are those who live by games of skill or
hazard--financiers, billiard-players, gamblers, and the like. But in
unloved toils, even under the prick of necessity, no man is continually
sedulous. Once eliminate the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound
the hope of riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and malingering.
Society will then be something not wholly unlike a cotton plantation in
the old days; with cheerful, careless, demoralised slaves, with elected
overseers, and, instead of the planter, a chaotic popular assembly. If
the blood be purposeful and the soil strong, such a plantation may
succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long
hours of leisure. But even then I think the whip will be in the
overseer's hands, and not in vain. For, when it comes to be a question
of each man doing his own share or the rest doing more, prettiness of
sentiment will be forgotten. To dock the skulker's food is not enough;
many will rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their
shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily. For such as these, then, the
whip will be in the overseer's hand; and his own sense of justice and
the superintendence of a chaotic popular assembly will be the only
checks on its employment. Now, you may be an industrious man and a good
citizen, and yet not love, nor yet be loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector.
It is admitted by private soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is
an evil not to be combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a
brief while you will either be disgraced or have deserted. And the
sergeant can no longer appeal to the lash. But if these things go on, we
shall see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an
inspector.

This for the unfortunate. But with the fortunate also, even those whom
the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well. It is concluded that
in such a state of society, supposing it to be financially sound, the
level of comfort will be high. It does not follow: there are strange
depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case
of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all besides; and it
is possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may sink even into
squalor. But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy instrument of
h