ry was extended to industrial workers, and with its
establishment disappeared the element of joy in labour.

For fifty years, about the blackest half-century civilization has had to
record, this condition of industrial slavery continued with little
amendment. Very slowly, however, the workers themselves, championed by
certain aristocrats like the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury against
professional Liberals like Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone in England,
began to loosen the shackles that bound them to infamous conditions, and
after the abrogation of laws that made any association of workingmen a
penal offense, the labour unions began to ameliorate certain of the
servile conditions under which for two generations the workman had
suffered. Since then the process of abolishing wage-slavery went slowly
forward until at last the war came not only to threaten its destruction
altogether but also to place the emancipated workers in a position where
they could dictate terms and conditions to capital, to employers, to
government and to the general public; while even now in many parts of
Europe and America, besides Russia, overt attempts are being made to
bring back the old slavery, only with the former bondsmen in supreme
dictatorship, the former employers and the "bourgeoisie" in the new
serfage.

The old slavery is gone, but the joy in work has not been restored;
instead, those who have achieved triumphant emancipation turn from
labour itself with the same distaste, yes, with greater aversion than
that which obtained under the old regime. With every added liberty and
exemption, with every shortening of hours and increase of pay,
production per hour falls off and the quality of the output declines.
What is the reason for this? Is it due to the viciousness of the worker,
to his natural selfishness, greed and cruelty? I do not think so, but
rather that the explanation is to be found in the fact that the
industrial system of modernism has resulted in a condition where the joy
has been altogether cut out of labour, and that until this state of
things has been reversed and the sense of the holiness of work and the
joy of working have been restored, it is useless to look for workable
solutions of the labour problem. The _fact_ of industrial slavery has
been done away with but the sense of the servile condition that attaches
to work has been retained, therefore the idea of the dignity and
holiness of labour has not come back any more than t