Page:Earth-Hunger and Other Essays.djvu/219

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LIBERTY AND RESPONSIBILITY
193

excellence, and in all that vague "elevation" which plays such a prominent part in social speculation just as much to be a good and faithful hod-carrier as to be a good and faithful statesman.

Labor does not brutalize—the distinction between manual and other labor in this respect is invalid. The people who are accustomed to factory work are not conscious of the hardships which a literary man may easily imagine that they must feel in it, any more than other men are conscious of hardship in the confinement of the editorial sanctum or the laboratory. It is only in literature or in the semi-loafer class that we find people actually reflecting and moralizing and complaining about whether the way in which they get their living is irksome. It is overwork which is brutalizing, and it is immaterial whether it is manual or intellectual work; but, as I said at the beginning, it is rarely that a man who is really overworked is in a position to say freely whether he will submit to it and be brutalized or not. Probably that is the reason why so few of that class pay any attention to the discussion, or ever make any complaint.

Liberty and Machinery

A great deal of stress is often laid on the assumed fact that men who labor, at least in manual occupations, are paid for their nerve and sinew, and inferences are deduced from this assertion of fact which are believed to establish especial hardship for that class of persons.

I am not able to find any case whatever, at the present time, in which a human being is paid for anything but intelligence. It may be that some one can bring forward a case; if so, I should be interested to see it. Any mere exertion of animal energy can be converted into