ople can
only live healthily who devote themselves to work, and that all
inaction is fatal, but is silent as to what science adds--that
excessive work destroys men with far greater rapidity than if they
were living in idleness. They say that work is a painful necessity for
the preservation of life, but they do not say it is a virtue, because
repose and sweet inaction are far more grateful to men and to all
animals than exertion and fatigue. The fable of Paradise, the story of
the Biblical God imposing the sweat of labour as a punishment in order
to earn subsistence, shows that in all times the natural temperament
of man considered rest as the pleasantest condition, and that work
must be considered as an evil indispensable to life, but all the same
an evil. Ruled by the instinct of preservation, man ought only to work
just as much as is necessary for food. But as the immense majority do
not work for themselves alone, but for the profits of a minority of
employers, these require that a man should work as much as he is able,
even if he dies from his over-exertion, and in this way they become
rich, hoarding the surplus from production. Their contention is that
a man should work more than is required for himself, that he should
produce more than is required for his own necessities. In this surplus
lies their wealth, and to obtain it they have invented a monstrous and
inhuman morality, that by means of religion and even of philosophy,
glorifies work, saying that work is the greatest of all virtues and
idleness the source of all vices. And this makes me ask, if idleness
is a vice in the poor, how is it that among the rich it is counted as
a sign of distinction and even of elevation of mind? And if work is
the greatest of all virtues, how is it that capitalists endeavour to
amass wealth in order to free themselves and their descendants from
the practice of so great a virtue? Why is it that this society which
exalts work with every sort of poetical conception relegates the
worker to the lowest rank? Why do they receive with greater enthusiasm
a soldier who has fought, more or less, than an aged workman who has
spent seventy years working without any one praising him or being
grateful to him for so much virtue?"

The servants of the Cathedral nodded their heads, assenting to what
fell from the master; they looked up to him as simple people always
look up to those who come down to them as apostles of a new idea.

The continual f