absurdity; to divide the total work, and to measure its fractions by the
number of hours spent on the work also leads us to absurdity. One thing
remains: to put the _needs_ above the _works_, and first of all to
recognize _the right to live_, and later on _the right to well-being_
for all those who took their share in production.

But take any other branch of human activity--take the manifestations of
life as a whole. Which one of us can claim the higher remuneration for
his work? Is it the doctor who has found out the illness, or the nurse
who has brought about recovery by her hygienic care? Is it the inventor
of the first steam-engine, or the boy, who, one day getting tired of
pulling the rope that formerly opened the valve to let steam under the
piston, tied the rope to the lever of the machine, without suspecting
that he had invented the essential mechanical part of all modern
machinery--the automatic valve?

Is it the inventor of the locomotive, or the workman of Newcastle, who
suggested replacing the stones formerly laid under the rails by wooden
sleepers, as the stones, for want of elasticity, caused the trains to
derail? Is it the engineer on the locomotive? The signalman who stops
the trains, or lets them pass by? The switchman who transfers a train
from one line to another?

Again, to whom do we owe the transatlantic cable? Is it to the
electrical engineer who obstinately affirmed that the cable would
transmit messages while learned men of science declared it to be
impossible? Is it to Maury, the learned physical geographer, who advised
that thick cables should be set aside for others as thin as a walking
cane? Or else to those volunteers, come from nobody knows where, who
spent their days and nights on deck minutely examining every yard of the
cable, and removed the nails that the shareholders of steamship
companies stupidly caused to be driven into the non-conducting wrapper
of the cable, so as to make it unserviceable?

And in a wider sphere, the true sphere of life, with its joys, its
sufferings, and its accidents, cannot each one of us recall someone who
has rendered him so great a service that we should be indignant if its
equivalent in coin were mentioned? The service may have been but a word,
nothing but a word spoken at the right time, or else it may have been
months and years of devotion, and we are going to appraise these
"incalculable" services in "labour-notes"?

"The works of each!" But huma