ay of the bourgeois class, would become an artistic pleasure.

Everyone would be the happier for it. In collective work, performed with
a light heart to attain a desired end, a book, a work of art, or an
object of luxury, each will find an incentive and the necessary
relaxation that makes life pleasant.

In working to put an end to the division between master and slave, we
work for the happiness of both, for the happiness of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] They _have_ already been discovered since the above lines were
written.

[7] We know this from Playfair, who mentioned it at Joule's death.

CHAPTER X

AGREEABLE WORK

I

When Socialists maintain that a society, freed from the rule of the
capitalists, would make work agreeable, and would suppress all repugnant
and unhealthy drudgery, they are laughed at. And yet even to-day we can
see the striking progress that is being made in this direction; and
wherever this progress has been achieved, employers congratulate
themselves on the economy of energy obtained thereby.

It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a
scientific laboratory. And it is no less evident that it would be
advantageous to make it so. In a spacious and well-ventilated factory
the work is better; it is easy to introduce many small ameliorations, of
which each represents an economy of time or of manual labour. And if
most of the workshops we know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the
workers are of no account in the organization of factories, and because
the most absurd waste of human energy is the distinctive feature of the
present industrial organization.

Nevertheless, now and again, we already find, even now, some factories
so well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the
work, be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five
hours a day, and if every one had the possibility of varying it
according to his tastes.

There are immense works, which I know, in one of the Midland counties,
unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. They are perfect as regards
sanitary and intelligent organization. They occupy fifty English acres
of land, fifteen of which are roofed with glass. The pavement of
fire-proof bricks is as clean as that of a miner's cottage, and the
glass roof is carefully cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing
else. In these works are forged steel ingots or blooms weighing as much
as twenty tons; and