uld perform their task perfectly well, and
they certainly would not put up with the horrible conditions in which
men toil nowadays without reforming them. If a Huxley spent only five
hours in the sewers of London, rest assured that he would have found the
means of making them as sanitary as his physiological laboratory.

As to the laziness of the great majority of workers, only philistine
economists and philanthropists can utter such nonsense.

If you ask an intelligent manufacturer, he will tell you that if workmen
only put it into their heads to be lazy, all factories would have to be
closed, for no measure of severity, no system of spying would be of any
use. You should have seen the terror caused in 1887 among British
employers when a few agitators started preaching the "_go-canny_"
theory--"Bad pay, bad work"; "Take it easy, do not overwork yourselves,
and waste all you can."--"They demoralize the worker, they want to kill
our industry!" cried those same people who the day before inveighed
against the immorality of the worker and the bad quality of his work.
But if the workers were what they are represented to be--namely, the
idler whom the employer is supposed continually to threaten with
dismissal from the workshop--what would the word "demoralization"
signify?

So when we speak of possible idlers, we must well understand that it is
a question of a small minority in society; and before legislating for
that minority, would it not be wise to study the origin of that
idleness? Whoever observes with an intelligent eye, sees well enough
that the child reputed lazy at school is often the one which simply does
not understand, because he is being badly taught. Very often, too, it is
suffering from cerebral anaemia, caused by poverty and an anti-hygienic
education. A boy who is lazy at Greek or Latin would work admirably were
he taught science, especially if he were taught with the aid of manual
labour. A girl who is stupid at mathematics becomes the first
mathematician of her class if she by chance meets somebody who can
explain to her the elements of arithmetic which she did not understand.
And a workman, lazy in the workshop, cultivates his garden at dawn,
while gazing at the rising sun, and will be at work again at nightfall,
when all nature goes to its rest.

Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same
definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people
gone astray in a