Morning journal and courier., 1890-03-05

those whose hard and unjust lot has com- pelled them to work all day, and who appa- rently regard the compulsion of necessity as almost as much deserving of resistance as the compulsion of the lash. The workman is often with them kind of convict, with the foreman for wander, the "shop" for pris- on, and the daily task to be finished for the sentence to hard labor.
 We wonder greatly whither this revolt against industry will lead, and whether it has any foundation in the realities of mod. ern life. But for certain circumstances, we should half suspect it had not, and should decide that the abhorrence of work was not the feeling of the workers, but only a feel- ing which litterateurs think that they them- selves would feel if they had manual labor to perform. We do not find that the educa. ted, when really overworked, as, for in- stance, rising pr fessionals often are over- worked till nature reyenges herself by strik- ing, usually detest the work. They often dislike its hurry, or the exclusion it enforces, or it's consequences upon health; but they do not dislike the work itself, and until they grow middle-aged, remain impatient of ad- vice to diminish it at the sacrifice of any portion of it's profits. They work on, and so do the poor when they are working for themselves. The small shopkeepers, the masterless artisans, and those agricultural laborers who possess allotments, often work like Chinese, thinking nothing of fifteen hours day, and if their gains are at all proportionate, are still fairly content. Nor do we notice this bitterness among workers for wages, if only the wages are enough. They wish for shorter hours, as almost all of us do, and if the hours exceed sixty in the week the wish grows passionately strong; but their most genuine feeling ia drawn out rather by the amount of their pay than by the hours they spend in earning 1t. It is not, however, possible to be blind to the fact that on the continent, and in some of our great cities, the laborers think of their labor as those who pity them do; that there is a bitterness as of men oppressed among them; that work is regarded as heavy burden, if not as 8 positive curse, and that the envy of leisure is keener, especially among the we ak CT sort, than the envy of wealth. It is diff cult to doubt that the artisans of cities at least bemoan their lot far more than they did, and that in capitals like Paris, Berlin and Vienna the growth of @ savage kind of socialism is the outcome of growing dis. content with toll as the permanent condition of existence. The workmen are not yet ar ticulate enongh to draw their own Utopias; ibutsif they could, we fancy that, with a portion of them at least, hard work would be only 6 rare incident in their daily lot.
 ,a The evil, so far as it is an evil-and we think 1t great one-is due, of course, parts ly to the startling increase of self-oonscious- ness which may be noticed in all men and in all departments of life; partly to the growth of the passion for comfort which distinguish es Europe and our own day; and partly to that impatience of the monotony inseparable from severe labor which is helping to pro- duce, for one symptom, the emigration of rural folk into the great cities Labor, as it is now sub. divided, is duIl, and therefore is sometimes detested bondags which men only endure because the pain of hunger is sharper than the rein of weariness. Our business to-day, however, is rather with the result which the new feeling, supposiDg it to spread until it became as general among Eu- ropean workmen as it is among French poets, would probably produce. We can see, we confess, no result for good, and, indeed, no result at all except vast increase of that pessimist melancholy which everywhere be- gins to reduce what there is of gladness in the world. The necessity of work will not cease. The body of workers, whenever they please, and are convinced enough to break up the armies by refusing them support, can of course distribute among themselves 50 much of ths worlds wealth as is not depen- dent upon credit or upon the exercise of brain power, as they have on the continent and throughout Asia gradually distributed the soil. They can do no more if they all die fighting, for equality and artificial credit | guide accept the wages of the man guided; but they can do this, and when they have done it all the work will still remain to be done. Houses must be built and repaired; cities must be paved and drained; fuel must be excavated with painful toil; metals must be dug out of the mines; the beasts must be tended and controlled; and, above all, the fields must be titled in all climates and un- der all weathers, and the crops must be got in with rapid and exhausting effort of one kind or another. The pleasure of leisure now enjoyed by perhaps one per cent. Of man. kind, may be made penal offence, and the exhaustion of the overworked may be re- duced-though none work so strenuously as the owners of their own fields, and socialism means, or should mean, ownership for all but the immense majority of the world, if they are to be as comfortable as the dreamy author of Hooking Backward" !" for instance, would have them, must still foil, and, as we believe, remembering the poverty of intense ly industrious peoples like the Prussian and Chinese, must still toll hard, and must, if there is any reason in the nature of things for the new feeling. still detest their labor. Men cannot be more industrious than the Chinese, or, for the most part, more equal; yet their ceaseless industry, guided by rare skill and expended on one of the most fer tile of countries, barely sufdces, if it can be said to suffice, to keep famine from their doors. Teil will not be the sweeter because all pay will be thrown into the common fund, or because the only employer, the community, can neither be evaded nor de- fed, nor told with safety. as some great en- ployers are now being told about twice a week, that it is ''a beastly oppressor batten- ing on bones and sweat" Thsre Is no chance of the worlds release from toll, for Cor or destiny, whichever 1t is, has settled that; and if toll is in itself burden-a proposition we are not discussing, though discussing we should deny it-it is burden the apparent weight of which must increase with every increase in cultivation and self consciousness, for we dc not suppose that even French poets will declare that the stu- pider the workman the more he suffers. With the burden, therefore. pain must in- crease until man is loaded down by the sense of necessary duty which he abhors, but of which he can never hope to be rid. We are not optimists, having a conviction that the ultimate use of man is other than his own happiness; but we look forward to happier destiny 10. tho human race than that.