ever.
And the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering to
evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood, in
which the workman works with the consciousness, not of the uselessness
merely, but of the social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the
poison that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his
children will be murdered. This, and not the question of wages, is the
gravest problem.

I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness that took place
on the banks of the river that flows through Bilbao, my native town. A
workman was hammering at something in a shipwright's yard, working
without putting his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or
worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when suddenly a woman's
voice was heard crying, "Help! help!" A child had fallen into the river.
Instantly the man was transformed. With an admirable energy,
promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into
the water to rescue the drowning infant.

Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the agrarian
socialist movement than in that of the towns is that the field labourer,
although his wages and his standard of living are no better than those
of the miner or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value
of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from extracting diamonds
from the earth.

And it may be that the greatest social progress consists in a certain
indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for exchanging one kind of
work for another, and that other not perhaps a more lucrative, but a
nobler one--for there are degrees of nobility in labour. But unhappily
it is only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation without
changing is concerned with making a religious vocation of it, or that
the man who changes his occupation for another does so from any
religious motive.

And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying his action on the
ground that the professional organism to which he belongs and in which
he works is badly organized and does not function as it ought, will
evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is
thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the
literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not
people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public
officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and
stud