t amidst my
garrulity?"

CHAPTER XV: ON THE LACK OF INCENTIVE TO LABOUR IN A COMMUNIST SOCIETY

"Yes," said I. "I was expecting Dick and Clara to make their appearance
any moment: but is there time to ask just one or two questions before
they come?"

"Try it, dear neighbour--try it," said old Hammond. "For the more you
ask me the better I am pleased; and at any rate if they do come and find
me in the middle of an answer, they must sit quiet and pretend to listen
till I come to an end. It won't hurt them; they will find it quite
amusing enough to sit side by side, conscious of their proximity to each
other."

I smiled, as I was bound to, and said: "Good; I will go on talking
without noticing them when they come in. Now, this is what I want to ask
you about--to wit, how you get people to work when there is no reward of
labour, and especially how you get them to work strenuously?"

"No reward of labour?" said Hammond, gravely. "The reward of labour is
_life_. Is that not enough?"

"But no reward for especially good work," quoth I.

"Plenty of reward," said he--"the reward of creation. The wages which
God gets, as people might have said time agone. If you are going to ask
to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work
means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the
begetting of children."

"Well, but," said I, "the man of the nineteenth century would say there
is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural
desire not to work."

"Yes, yes," said he, "I know the ancient platitude,--wholly untrue;
indeed, to us quite meaningless. Fourier, whom all men laughed at,
understood the matter better."

"Why is it meaningless to you?" said I.

He said: "Because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so
far from thinking that, that, as you may have noticed, whereas we are not
short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we
shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of
losing, not a pain."

"Yes," said I, "I have noticed that, and I was going to ask you about
that also. But in the meantime, what do you positively mean to assert
about the pleasurableness of work amongst you?"

"This, that _all_ work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of
gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes
pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not p