ailed for more than a century;
they will be ephemeral in their existence and futile in their results
unless sense of holiness is restored, and the joy in production and
creation given back to those who have been defrauded.

Before Christianity prevailed slavery was universal in civilized
communities, labour, as conducted under that regime, was a curse, and
this at length came home to roost on the gaunt wreckage of imperialism.
Thereafter came slowly increasing liberty under the feudal system with
its small social units and its system of production for use not profits,
monasticism with its doctrine and practice of the sanctity of work, and
the Church with its progressive emancipation of the spiritual part of
man. Work was not easy, on the contrary it was very hard throughout the
Dark Ages and Mediaevalism, but there is no particular merit in easy
work. It was virtually free except for the labour and contributions in
kind exacted by the over-lord (less in proportion than taxes in money
have been at several times since) from the workers on the soil, and in
the crafts of every kind redeemed from undue arduousness by the joy that
comes from doing a thing well and producing something of beauty,
originality and technical perfection.

The period during which work possessed the most honourable status and
the joy in work was the greatest, extends from the beginnings of the
twelfth century well into the sixteenth. In some centuries, and along
certain lines of activity, it continued much longer, notably in England
and the United States, but social and industrial conditions were rapidly
changing, the old aristocracy was becoming perverted, Lutheranisms,
Calvinism and Puritanism were breaking down the old communal sense of
brotherhood so arduously built up during the Middle Ages, capitalism was
ousting the trade and craft guilds of free labour and political
absolutism was crushing ever lower and lower a proletariat that was fast
losing the last vestiges of old liberty. The fact of slavery without the
name was gradually imposed on the agricultural classes, and after the
suppression of the monasteries in England work as work lost its sacred
character and fell under contempt. With the outbreak of industrialism in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the institution and
introduction of "labour-saving" machinery and the consequent division of
labour, the factory system, the joint-stock company and capitalism, this
new slave