ss in any industrial system is the
degree to which it enables men to 'do their bit' and so to find
happiness in their daily work, or if you prefer more distinctively
religious language, the degree to which it enables men to develop the
God that is in them. Let us have the courage to say that in the great
battle which Ruskin and William Morris fought almost single-handed
against all the Philistines of the nineteenth century, Ruskin and
Morris, however wrong they may have been on points of practical detail,
were right in principle. Let us make up our minds that a world in which
men have surrendered the best hours of the day to unsatisfying drudgery,
and banished happiness to their brief periods of tired leisure, is so
far from civilized that it has not even made clear to itself wherein
civilization consists. And when we read such a passage as the following
from a leading modern economist, let us not yield to the promptings of
our lower nature and acquiesce in its apparent common sense, but
remember that economists, like all workmen, are bounded by the limits of
their own particular craft or study. 'The greater part of the world's
work,' says Professor Taussig,[71] the leading exponent of Economics at
Harvard,

is not in itself felt to be pleasurable. Some reformers have
hoped to reach a social system under which all work would be
in itself a source of satisfaction. It is probable that
such persons are made optimistic by the nature of their own
doings. They are writers, schemers, reformers; they are
usually of strongly altruistic character, and the
performance of any duty or set task brings to them the
approval of an exacting conscience; and they believe that
all mankind can be brought to labour in their own spirit.
The world would be a much happier place if their state of
mind could be made universal. But the great mass of men are
of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or any
loftiness of character. Moreover, most of the world's work
for the satisfaction of our primary wants must be of a
humdrum sort, and often of a rough and coarse sort. There
must be ditching and delving, sowing and reaping, hammering
and sawing, and all the severe physical exertion which,
however lightened by tools and machinery, yet can never be
other than labour in the ordinary sense of the word.

When Professor Taussig assures us that 'the gre