direction that does not answer to their temperament nor
to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are
struck with the number of "idlers" among them. They were lazy so long as
they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to
excess. Darwin, Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of
idlers.

Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to spend all
his life making the eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a
watch, while he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to
expend elsewhere. Often, too, he is a rebel who cannot submit to being
fixed all his life to a work-bench in order to procure a thousand
pleasures for his employer, while knowing himself to be far the less
stupid of the two, and knowing his only fault to be that of having been
born in a hovel instead of coming into the world in a castle.

Lastly, an immense number of "idlers" are idlers because they do not
know well enough the trade by which they are compelled to earn their
living. Seeing the imperfect thing they make with their own hands,
striving vainly to do better, and perceiving that they never will
succeed on account of the bad habits of work already acquired, they
begin to hate their trade, and, not knowing any other, hate work in
general. Thousands of workmen and artists who are failures suffer from
this cause.

On the other hand, he who since his youth has learned to play the piano
_well_, to handle the plane _well_, the chisel, the brush, or the file,
so that he feels that what he does is _beautiful_, will never give up
the piano, the chisel, or the file. He will find pleasure in his work
which does not tire him, so long as he is not overdriven.

Under the one name, _idleness_, a series of results due to different
causes have been grouped, of which each one could be a source of good,
instead of being a source of evil to society. Like all questions
concerning criminality and related to human faculties, facts have been
collected having nothing in common with one another. People speak of
laziness or crime, without giving themselves the trouble to analyze the
cause. They are in a hurry to punish these faults without inquiring if
the punishment itself does not contain a premium on "laziness" or
"crime."[9]

This is why a free society, if it saw the number of idlers increasing in
its midst, would no doubt think of looking first for the _cause_ of
laziness, in